Chinese bots flood Twitter with explicit porn to drown out news of lockdown protests

Chinese users looking for news in cities like Shanghai and Beijing, which have been grappling with anti-lockdown protests in recent days, see advertisements for escorts and pornography

Demonstrations erupted across China (

Image: Getty Images)

Chinese bots have flooded Twitter with explicit content to distract news from the ongoing protests against the spread of the country's harsh Covid lockdown measures.

Users searching for any of the major cities affected by this weekend's protests "will primarily see ads for escorts/pornography/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results," according to the analyst account Chinese data carrier, AirMovingDevice.

Sharing a series of graphs, the account said, "Analysis of the data in this thread suggests that there has been a significant increase in these spam tweets."

The data was later retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos.

Over 95% of posts are downloaded at a "high and steady rate throughout the day", indicating that they are posted by spambot accounts.

Mangyu Dong, a researcher at Stanford University, said escort ads have made it “more difficult for Chinese users to access information about mass protests.”

Previously inactive Twitter accounts have come to life, spamming the social media site with escort and porn advertisements

She added that many accounts hadn't been used in years, suddenly springing to life "after protests erupted in China."

She mentioned an account that was created seven years ago, but has posted over 2,000 NSFW texts in the last 15 hours.

"Unfortunately, if a Chinese decides to come