Twitter searches for major cities in China have become swamped with tweets promoting escort services, p*rnography, and gambling that are obscuring legitimate results about the ongoing protests in the country.
China-based data analyst and researchers from Stanford have been looking into the wave of spam tweets and found that more than 95 per cent of tweets relating to Beijing were from spam accounts.
Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you’ll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. pic.twitter.com/Ao46g2ILzf— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
The demonstrations in the country are in response to the ongoing lockdowns following Covid outbreaks.
Searches for “北京” (Beijing) or “上海” (Shanghai), for example, will bring up all manner of tweets pointing to some very lewd content.
However, the failure to detect these spam accounts represents a major blow for Elon Musk’s Twitter. The South African businessman had expressed concerns over the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform in the lead up to his acquisition. In fact, Musk was so perturbed by the number of inauthentic accounts that he sought to reduce the AU$68.2 billion he paid for the social media site.
Content moderation — despite Musk’s protests — is becoming a growing problem on Twitter.
On Sunday, Twitter had to remove newly posted videos of the Christchurch mosque shootings only after the New Zealand government flagged them as harmful content.
According to Gizmodo, users had alerted the New Zealand government to the video being reuploaded to Twitter on Saturday. Jacinda Ardern’s government says that the company’s system for detecting harmful content had failed to flag them.
“Twitter advised us overnight that the clips have been taken down and said they would do a sweep for other instances,” a spokesperson told the Guardian.
For advertisers, these failures in Twitter’s content moderation system will do little to make them believe that the site is safe for their brands to feature on.
