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Protests against the Chinese regime: »All employees responsible for Chinese influence operations have left the company«
Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Anyone who searched for the locations of dissident demonstrations on Twitter in Chinese on Sunday often saw large amounts of spam - instead of reports on current events on site.
Twitter videos showed how the network was flooded with tons of advertisements for Chinese escort services.
According to the Washington Post, this resulted in pages and pages of useless tweets on Sunday.
The posts were therefore provided with the names of cities or the exact locations of demonstrations, which means that the reports of the protests there were lost by the hour.
Some of the accounts that spread the spam are said to have previously not posted any content for months or years.
A former Twitter employee told the newspaper that accounts with ties to the Chinese government have used a similar technique in the past.
Previously, however, the strategy had been used to discredit individual users or a small group by being mentioned in the escort advertisement.
A China expert working for the US government estimated the proportion of spam diversionary tactics: "50 percent pornography, 50 percent protests."
These are Chinese-language contributions;
those who searched Twitter in English found mainly protest images.
Elon Musk's Course Facilitates China's Censorship
As recently as Monday, figures from an analysis service showed that another, harmless hashtag was spreading en masse in Chinese.
With several hundred thousand posts, the hashtag is one of the most used Chinese-language keywords and could also make information about the protests less easy to find.
After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk fired numerous employees, and others left the company after Musk threatened particularly harsh working conditions.
In particular, as the Washington Post reports, the human rights, security and anti-tampering departments have been shrunk to no or a handful of employees.
"All employees in charge of Chinese influence operations have left the company," the newspaper's former Twitter contributor explained.
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