Elon Musk Slashed Twitter’s Safety Team. Then a Chinese Spam Campaign Ran Rampant

The global implications of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, in which Twitter’s staff has dwindled from roughly 7,500 to 2,000, was on full display Sunday, as Chinese spam accounts—suspected to be connected to the government—seemingly manipulated the platform to obscure reports of protests against the country’s COVID policies. For hours on Sunday, users who searched in Chinese for major Chinese cities on Twitter were inundated with links for escort services, porn, and gambling, a flood of content from “numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years” that “researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news” about the escalating protests, according to the Washington Post. Twitter was “aware of the problem by midday and was working to resolve it,” per the Post. 

Protests have spread across China, where widespread public dissent is rare, over the country’s harsh COVID protocols. The widespread anger was set off by a deadly fire in an apartment building in Urumqi where many residents had been under lockdown, prompting public questions over whether the COVID restrictions hindered or prevented people from escaping. “Makeshift barricades and bolted doors have become a key feature of efforts to prevent people who might have been exposed to the virus from leaving their homes and buildings,” the New York Times reports. Some protesters are calling for the removal of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader “who for nearly three years has overseen a strategy of mass-testing, brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantine and digital tracking that has come at a devastating human and economic cost,” CNN reports. Attempts to cover the protests have already been met with resistance: BBC journalist Edward Lawrence was arrested by police in Shanghai while covering the protests Sunday night, despite working as an accredited journalist. “He was held for several hours before being released. During his arrest, he was beaten and kicked by the police,” BBC said in a statement, noting that Chinese authorities have offered “no official explanation or apology” for what happened “beyond a claim by the officials who later released him that they had arrested him for his own good in case he caught Covid from the crowd. We do not consider this a credible explanation.” A Swiss TV journalist was also briefly detained by Chinese police Sunday, per CNN. 

Twitter has in the past dealt with foreign interference, and a former Twitter employee told the Post that this specific technique by accounts thought to be tied to the state is “a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place.” But Sunday’s campaign comes as Twitter’s content-moderation capacity is particularly weak. Musk has wreaked havoc on the Trust and Safety team since taking over late last month, ushering in massive layoffs and attempting to overhaul the company’s approach to content moderation. What happened Sunday, the former employee said, was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” because “all the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.” All of which leaves Twitter in a much different position to take on misinformation campaigns than, say, in 2020, when it found and removed thousands of state-linked accounts spreading pro-China content regarding coronavirus and protests in Hong Kong. In 2021, Twitter again removed thousands of accounts tied to Chinese propaganda campaigns, this time regarding the human rights abuses that China has been accused of committing against the Uyghur population. Musk hasn’t commented specifically on the Chinese activity around the protests, tweeting early Monday, “The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous! At least with new Verified they will pay $8 for the privilege haha.”

Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos tweeted Sunday that his team was still “working on our own analysis” while sharing a thread suggesting the Chinese actions were “an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China.” He added: “Looks like we might have the first major failure to stop gov interference in the Musk era.”