Explained: How China is using sex bots to quell the COVID protests on social media

A simple search for China’s protests on Twitter may display a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services and gambling content. Welcome to China and its censorship machinery that is now in overdrive as the Asian giant sees rare and unprecedented protests over the strict zero-COVID policy.

The country has erupted in anger, with people coming out on to the streets, holding blank pieces of paper and chanting slogans “Xi Jinping, step down”, “Communist party, step down” and “Unlock Xinjiang, unlock China”.

Also read: Why Chinese demonstrators are holding up papers with a physics equation

The rare widespread protests began after 10 people died last week in a fire in the city of Urumqi. Many believe residents could not escape the blaze because of the strict COVID curbs. However, this claim has been refuted by authorities.

As is the norm in China, authorities have stepped in to curb the protests — by any means necessary. On Tuesday, some images and videos emerged on social media in which authorities were seen asking members of the public to delete images of the demonstrations from their phones.

This is in addition to the spam being released on social media networks in an attempt to stop people searching for footage of the protests.

Spam attack

Since the protests broke out on Friday, users on Twitter looking for posts from those Chinese cities on the microblogging platform were bombarded with pages of spam tweets instead of useful information about the protests.

Mengyu Dong, a Chinese-American researcher at Stanford University, highlighted the issue, stating that Chinese bots were flooding Twitter with escort ads, possibly to make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests.

In his long thread of messages, he added, “Sadly if a Chinese person decides to come to Twitter to find out what happened in China last night, these nsfw (not suitable for work) posts shared by bots are likely the first to show up in their search results.”

According to a Washington Post report, large numbers of Chinese-language Twitter accounts burst into life on Sunday and began inundating search feeds with racy images, suggestive videos and links to escort services.

A closer look at these accounts show that several of them were created years ago and had been lying dormant, having posted little to no content. However, since the protests spread across the country, the accounts suddenly began churning out thousands of posts per day.

The erotic images and videos included in the posts are accompanied by the names of cities to ensure that the distraction would turn up in searches for those seeking information on the demonstrations.

Alex Stamos, director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, also spotted the scheme, mentioning on Twitter that this was “an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China”.

Twitter’s staff crunch

Analysts have noted that the rise in bot activity from China follows widespread job cuts at Twitter.

In the layoffs earlier this month after Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter slashed its entire workforce from 7,500 to roughly 2,000, including the company’s entire human rights and machine learning ethics teams.

It has been reported that the company staff as well as outsourced contract workers working on the platform’s safety concerns and deceptive foreign influence operations were reduced to no staff or a handful of people.

The spike in spam tweets also challenges Musk’s stance on bots. Earlier, the billionaire had tried to renege on the Twitter deal, claiming that the social media platform was hiding the true number of fake accounts. Spammers and other bogus users may now be more of a problem than they were before, if just because Twitter isn’t as well-equipped to deal with the threat.

Not the first time

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that China is using such tactics to censor or hide the truth on social media platforms.

During the 2019 mass protests in Hong Kong, China had reportedly launched a blitz depicting the agitations as riots funded by the CIA. China-linked social media accounts then flooded Twitter and Facebook with thousands of pro-Beijing posts and targeted advertisements.

Speaking about the disinformation drive carried out by China, King-wa Fu, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, told NPR, “Chinese media like [state broadcaster] CGTN or China Daily cannot independently recreate the China narrative on social media. That’s why they need to make use of these means to create social media traffic and to try to create a way to counter the pro-Hong Kong narrative on the social media.”

It was only much later that the social media giants — Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — suspended these accounts.

A year later, news emerged of an army of bot accounts linked to an alleged Chinese government-backed propaganda campaign spreading disinformation on social media about coronavirus and other topics.

Benjamin Strick, who specialises in analysing information operations on social media websites, had found that the accounts were being used to spread conspiracy theories blaming the US for the origins of virus.

Between 25 April and 3 May of 2020, Strick said he identified more than 1,000 accounts on Twitter that were associated with the Chinese disinformation effort, as well as more than 50 different pages on Facebook. He estimated that 300 or 400 new Twitter accounts were joining the network each day, as part of the Chinese campaign.

More proof of China unleashing bots to spread misinformation came in 2021 through a seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University. The study showed China’s rise on Twitter had been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people.

What happens next in China is unknown — will the protesters continue their demand for freedom from lockdowns or will the authorities crush the dissent. However, it’s time social media platforms truly get their act together against this exercise in misinformation.

With inputs from agencies

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