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China's SEX BOT smokescreen: How Beijing is using porn to drown out Covid protests

The protests rocked China a month after President Xi Jinping was elected to a record-breaking third term at the party's national congress

BEIJING, CHINA: Rare anti-government rallies that have engulfed China over its Zero-Covid policy have not abated. Ten people were "murdered" in an apartment fire on November 24 because of severe Covid regulations that made it impossible for fire engines to arrive in time. Urumqi, in the remote Western part of Xinjiang province, was where the protests originally started. Currently, the worldwide anti-government demonstrations have extended to at least 16 countries and two of China's largest cities, in the capital Beijing and financial hub Shanghai.

Many malicious web accounts of porn, escorts, and other racy profiles are flooding Twitter as demonstrators and police continue to brawl, and many suggest that this is all part of an "effort to hide the news of mass protests." Protesters in Urumqi on Saturday, November 26 shouted, "Need freedom, need human rights. Step down, XI." The protest is also noteworthy since the Communist Party of China, which is well known for controlling all facets of social life, has cracked down on dissent by using high-tech mass surveillance. Most crucially, with 2 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities living in camps who are frequently accused of physical and sexual mistreatment, Xinjiang, where these protests began and have continued since, is more closely monitored by the regime.

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The protests rocked China a month after President Xi Jinping was elected to a record-breaking third term at the party's national congress, making him China's most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. Twitter was banned in China in 2019 but is still available through VPN and other proxies, and as people started to share protests on it, China's heavy-handed tactics to the smokescreen came through bot accounts, as per the Daily Mail.

Mengyu Dong, a researcher at Stanford University posted several tweets highlighting spam accounts flooding Twitter and appealed to Elon Musk to tackle it. "Search the name of any major city in Chinese: 北京 上海 南京 郑州 兰州 etc and you’ll see thousands of NSFW escort ads. While similar ads exist for years, they weren’t being shared with the same frequency as seen in the last 24h since mass protests broke out." Dong then mentioned Musk asking, "Unless twitter does something about this. will you?"

A Twitter user wrote, "Can @elonmusk explain why top search results for these Chinese cities are all escort ads? There have been active protests in these cities and people inside China are coming to Twitter to see what the government has censored."

China bases data analysts first noticed the uptick in spam accounts as the search for cities like Beijing popped 95% of bot results posting nude content and escort services like crazy. Air-Moving Device posted a thread on Twitter stating: "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." "I searched for 北京 (Beijing) today (11/28 ~5 am Beijing time) and identified accounts with tweets that show up in the 'Latest' search results. The vast majority (>95%) of these are spam accounts. They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation. Then I looked at the number of tweets by each account over time. Interestingly, more than 70% of these spam accounts only started tweeting like crazy recently. The rest (~top 90 in this plot) seem to have been spamming consistently for a while." 

Detentions have also been reported amid reports of protests involving university students, such as those at Tsinghua University, where demonstrators chanted, "Democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression," and Peking University, where students chanted "We want freedom, not lockdowns" and "Dynamic zero-Covid is a lie" while singing 'The Internationale' in front of a group of uniformed security guards, as per SCMP.

At a memorial on Saturday night for the victims of the Xinjiang fire, hundreds of students at the Communication University of China, Nanjing, sang, "Long live the people, may the dead rest in peace." The source was able to view a video in which a university representative could be heard telling students, "One day you will pay for what you did today."

In Shanghai Edward Lawrence, a camera operator for the BBC's China Bureau was beaten and arrested while covering the protests. BBC said, "it's extremely concerned about the treatment of one of its journalists, who was beaten and arrested by police while covering the protests - and later released."