For the first time, the Covid Zero policy led to significant, as for China, protests in various cities of the country. The Chinese authorities are trying to hide information about them not only on the internal Internet but also on such social networks as Twitter, taking advantage of its instability.

As reported by The The Washington Post, which on Sunday was radically reduced by Twitter’s anti-propaganda team, struggled to deal with the flood of pornographic content. According to researchers, it was aimed at “drowning” the flow of news from places of protests against restrictions related to the coronavirus.

Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some of which had been inactive for months or years, sprung to life early Sunday morning and began spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings along with city names.
As a result, within hours, anyone who searched for posts from these cities and used Chinese place names saw meaningless porn spam instead of information about the protests.

According to a recently fired Twitter employee, this isn’t the first time suspicious government-linked accounts have taken this approach. But in the past, it has more often worked to discredit a specific account or a small group of users by mentioning them in ads for escort services.

“This is a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place,” said a former Twitter employee who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation for revealing internal processes.

As a result of mass layoffs and resignations, Twitter’s total workforce has shrunk from about 7,500 to about 2,000 people, according to estimates from the social network’s surviving employees. Some groups, including those dealing with human rights, security issues, and deceptive foreign influence operations, have been reduced to a handful of people or no staff at all.

The campaign was noticed by researchers at Stanford University and other institutions. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said his team is working to determine how widespread and effective it is.

A current Twitter employee told an outside researcher that the company was aware of the problem by noon and was working on a solution. By the end of Sunday, news and images of the protests finally began to appear in the search results of posts in the cities where the rallies were held.

“Fifty percent porn, 50 percent protests,” said one U.S. government contractor and China expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue. “Once I got 3 to 4 scrolls into the feed” to see posts from earlier in the day, it was “all porn.”