Twitter confronts Chinese spam that blocks news about protests

The result: After hours of searching for posts in those cities, using the Chinese names of the sites, one would see pages and pages full of useless tweets and not any information about them. Bold protestsIt escalated to calls for the resignation of Communist Party leaders.

According to the Twitter employee who recently left, this isn’t the first instance of suspected government-linked accounts using the technique. However, in the past it was used to discredit one account or small groups of accounts by naming them via escort advertisements.

“This is a known issue that our team was dealing with manually, regardless of the automation we put in place,” said the former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution for revealing internal processes.

According to estimates by surviving employees, the number of Twitter employees has dropped from approximately 7,500 to almost 2,000 due to mass layoffs and resignations. Some groups, including those that deal with human rights issues, safety concerns and deceptive foreign-influence operations, have been reduced to less than 2,000. Reduced to a handful of people or no staff at all.

The ex-employee said Sunday’s campaign was “another fair, where there are now greater gaps to fill”. “Influencer China operations and Twitter analysts all quit.”

Researchers tracked the campaign. Stanford University And the in another place. Alex Stamos, director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, stated that his team is currently working to determine its effectiveness and reach.

An employee at Twitter stated to an outside researcher that the company was aware by midday of the issue and was working on fixing it.

Late Sunday night, news stories and photos about the protests were showing up in flyer searches of the cities where they were taking place.

“Fifty percent porn, fifty percent protest,” said a US contractor and expert on China, who spoke anonymously to discuss intelligence issues. “Once I got 3 to 4 scrolls in the feed” to see posts from earlier in the day, it was “all porn.”