Vicky Xu / 许秀中 @[email protected]

Some analyses done around the end of Nov into this Chinese-language bot activity observed a “surge” from around the time when protests started, which invited the theory that it might be a deliberate information campaign.

@det explained this recency bias. "In retrospective research, historical Twitter data generally becomes 'cleaner' — some amount of spam and inauthentic behavior will have been removed...inauthentic content tends to appear most prevalent in the immediate past."

I talked to people behind two escort services’ spam accounts, both said that they provide escorts and use ad services on Twitter. One said they have no connection with the Chinese government, and said they also promote their services on Facebook and Instagram.

I also contacted an ad service seen in two spam posts and received a rate sheet. This business charges about $1,400 a month for an ad campaign on Twitter involving 200 bot accounts that will tweet at least 150 times a day.

Rate sheet:

The findings match a report published today by @det from Stanford Internet Observatory who reviewed millions of tweets by searching for 30 Chinese cities and found that bots were active before the protests began and continued after they had ebbed.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/content-moderation-survivor-bias

We searched on Twitter for 16 cities and reviewed the results for spam. When we did the searches in simplified Chinese, bots were active throughout, for Chinese cities with or without protests as well as for foreign cities.

When searching the city names in English, the results returned no spam among top tweets.

The comparison underscores the inefficacy of Twitter and other large American social media platforms’ content moderation work on non-English posts.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/19/technology/twitter-bots-china-protests-elon-musk.html

Our latest story (also my first Mastodon post!):

Twitter users were drowned with adult content spam when they searched for information about the historic anti-lockdown protests in China.

Through data analysis and interviews with people behind bots, we found that much of the spam is linked to commercial bot networks.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/19/technology/twitter-bots-china-protests-elon-musk.html

@board
报道新疆强迫劳动的勇敢记者 Vicky Xu / 许秀中也来到了联邦宇宙 @vickyxu 。她表示虽然乳齿象很难用，但为了自由还是想学一学。大家快来教教她～～