The Chinese protest against the new Covid restrictions is colliding on social media with a wall of "spam" tweets. In these hours, Musk's platform is registering an avalanche of porn content, announcements of escorts and gambling that are obscuring the disputes that have arisen in recent days in Beijing and Shanghai.
The wave of posts – created automatically by some profiles presumed to be linked to the Xi government – coincides with the resurgence of discontent among the population .
An analysis conducted by the Stanford Internet Observatory estimated that over 95% of tweets with the search term "Beijing" come from accounts that disseminate "pirate" information.
Due to censorship, many citizens are using VPNs - virtual networks that create a secure internet connection and guarantee online privacy - to access internet services and social media such as Twitter and Telegram to organize protests. Here, however, their voice is lost due to the high number of illegal messages which makes it more difficult to find official information.
The wave of spam on Twitter coincides with the multiple layoffs initiated by Elon Musk after the purchase of the company, which have evidently had a major impact on the platform's security sector.
(Unioneonline/vf)