China Distracts From Protests by Spamming with Porn
There is currently an unprecedented level of protests going on in the country. This comes from the draconian Covid-prevention lockdowns, the lack of food and medical care and the apartment building fire that killed a number of people, in part because the fire department could not get close enough to the building to get water on the fire, due to the anti-Covid measures the government is taking.
There is, of course, a lot of traffic on Twitter (and other social media) about what is going on. Since China can’t bully Musk into taking down those posts (although given the amount of manufacturing he does there, they do have some leverage – that is, of course, a two way street because he could also threaten them) they have come up with a different mechanism to drown out the noise.
If you can’t remove the posts, you do the equivalent of a denial of service attack on Twitter.
They are using bots to post huge amounts of bogus traffic using the same hash tags as the legitimate posts are using. #China. #Beijing. #Shanghai and other cities, in Chinese on Twitter.
What do you see? An occasional legitimate post.
And posts on gambling. And porn. Lots of porn. One assumes that is to embarrass the viewer and maybe get them to stop looking.
One estimate is that 95% of the posts are spam. That means if a user were to look at 100 posts about the protests, 95 would be about porn, gambling, escort services and other salacious content. And 5 of them would be legitimate.
Given that Twitter is running on, at best, a skeleton crew and that crew is trying to keep the wheels on the bus, content moderation, other than anything that is automatic, is likely not happening. And, given that Musk has indicated that he really doesn’t want to do content moderation, that doesn’t help.
Early on, the statistics of these malicious posts (yup, probably some malicious links too) were done by a few bots doing, say, a hundred tweets each, per hour. But now it has evolved to lots and lots of bots, each doing a handful of tweets per hour. This makes it almost impossible to automatically suppress, especially if the accounts keep changing.
Just the other day Elon bragged that the number of new accounts being created was very large. If those accounts are just being created to send spam, that is not useful.
Hopefully, the remaining team at Twitter is working very hard to suppress this noise because if they are not successful, even more advertisers will leave because they don’t want to be associated with this mess.
And of course, Twitter has to deal with the DoJ consent decree and the EU laws governing content moderation.
I wish Twitter the best of luck, but the problem is not easy to solve. Stay tuned.
Credit: CyberNews
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