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Twitter's reduced staff grapples with Chinese spam obscuring news of widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions
MSN via Washington Post ^ | 11/27/2022 | Joseph Menn

Posted on 11/27/2022 8:59:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind

Twitter’s radically reduced anti-propaganda team grappled on Sunday with a flood of nuisance content in China that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions.

Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.

The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.

It is not the first time that suspected government-connected accounts have used the technique, according to a recently departed Twitter employee. But in the past, it was used to discredit a single account or a small group by naming them in the escort ads.

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

In mass layoffs and resignations, Twitter’s overall staff has been slashed from about 7,500 to roughly 2,000, surviving employees estimated. Some groups, including those dealing with human rights issues, safety concerns and deceptive foreign influence operations, have been reduced to a handful of people or no staff at all.

Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”

The campaign was spotted by researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere. Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos said his team is working to determine how widespread and effective it is.

(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: ccp; china; concerntroll; concerntrolls; demagogicparty; districtofcolumbia; elonmusk; jeffbezos; josephmenn; mediawingofthednc; musk; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; protests; ronklain; spam; truthsocial; twitter; washingtoncompost; washingtonpost
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To: DoughtyOne

I would if I could, but it’s not in my emoji list. 👎


21 posted on 11/27/2022 10:53:32 PM PST by Mark17 (Retired USAF air traffic controller. Father of USAF pilot. USAF aviation runs in the family )
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Comment #22 Removed by Moderator

To: DoughtyOne
Why doesn't everyone in China simply log on to FR and search for "zero covid protest"?
23 posted on 11/27/2022 10:57:23 PM PST by DoodleBob ( Gravity’s waiting period is about 9.8 m/s²)
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To: Mark17

“< img src=“html://www.hotr.us/graphics/thumpsup.png” height=50 >”

Drop spaces after first < and before last >.

Of course the first and last quotation marks have to go.


24 posted on 11/27/2022 10:58:38 PM PST by DoughtyOne (I pledge allegiance to the flag of the U S of A, and to the {Const'l} REPUBLIC for which it stands.)
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To: Mark17
A bonus..


25 posted on 11/27/2022 11:00:16 PM PST by DoughtyOne (I pledge allegiance to the flag of the U S of A, and to the {Const'l} REPUBLIC for which it stands.)
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To: DoodleBob

Jim needs to get to work!

Smile...


26 posted on 11/27/2022 11:00:55 PM PST by DoughtyOne (I pledge allegiance to the flag of the U S of A, and to the {Const'l} REPUBLIC for which it stands.)
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To: SeekAndFind

https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz


27 posted on 11/27/2022 11:02:10 PM PST by Pollard ( )
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To: SeekAndFind

Musk has always, always been a shill for the CCP. This is why he fired most of the employees and did not replace them.

He’s trying to get rid of Trump and also boost China. But he’s using a fake “anti-woke” stance to deceive Republicans.


28 posted on 11/27/2022 11:04:24 PM PST by GulliverSwift
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To: DoughtyOne

Ok, I see it’s an image. I just use the emojis, that are included in IOS. 😁🫥


29 posted on 11/27/2022 11:06:08 PM PST by Mark17 (Retired USAF air traffic controller. Father of USAF pilot. USAF aviation runs in the family )
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To: Mark17

Yes, it’s a png.

Take care...


30 posted on 11/27/2022 11:07:00 PM PST by DoughtyOne (I pledge allegiance to the flag of the U S of A, and to the {Const'l} REPUBLIC for which it stands.)
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To: DoughtyOne

You take care as well. 😎


31 posted on 11/27/2022 11:07:50 PM PST by Mark17 (Retired USAF air traffic controller. Father of USAF pilot. USAF aviation runs in the family )
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...
Elon Musk's fault!!! Agitprop / Panic Porn from a Partisan Media Shill and Stooge.

32 posted on 11/27/2022 11:36:43 PM PST by SunkenCiv (What's his FR nick?)
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To: Paladin2

*grin*


33 posted on 11/28/2022 2:49:38 AM PST by sauropod (Fascists also buy Comcast cable packages" - Olby - Wanna buy mine?)
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To: SeekAndFind
Elon Musk has taken Twitter IT from a great lot of screeching monkeys throwing 💩at the wall to a small group of elite geniuses who easily transferred their talent stack from Rocket Science to running a chat forum.

And I absolutely believe the war on the bots is in full swing and will have promising results.

We will also get to enjoy great hilarity when Elon succeeds despite all of the woketurds screaming and wondering what they will do with all that 💩 now that they’ve lost Twitter.

34 posted on 11/28/2022 2:59:37 AM PST by Caipirabob (Communists...Socialists...Fascists & AntiFa...Democrats...Traitors... Who can tell the difference?)
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To: SeekAndFind

There are a number of people on twitter who do a great job of discovering information and re-tweeting it.

All that needs to happen is for more people to follow them and for twitter to have a setting for “search primarily among posts of people I follow “

For example if you want to see what’s happening in China

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec

For example

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1596892131578155010

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1597051747133845504

https://twitter.com/Shanghaishang10/status/1596875911457959938?cxt=HHwWhMCjzcmLn6ksAAAA


35 posted on 11/28/2022 3:36:10 AM PST by SauronOfMordor (The rot of all principle begins with a single compromise.)
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To: SeekAndFind

“The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as”

how difficult would it be to utilize a simple algorithm that organizes search results based on the number of views from a diverse number of addresses? ... that’s what google was initially all about until they perverted that with overrides to promote hard left nonsense and sink conservative conversation ...


36 posted on 11/28/2022 4:15:17 AM PST by catnipman (In a post-covid world, ALL "science" is now political science: stolen elections have consequences)
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To: SeekAndFind

The old Twitter would be working with the Chinese to suppress the news of the protests over there.


37 posted on 11/28/2022 4:24:56 AM PST by SamAdams76 (4,654,320 | Truth Social | 87,755,089 | Twitter | Trump Followers)
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To: DoodleBob
Why doesn't everyone in China simply log on to FR and search for "zero covid protest"?

likely because like other pro-America/pro-Freedom websites, it's blocked by China's great firewall.

China monitors all web traffic in/out of China and has records of all users access to all websites. Dissidents are not tolerated on the internet.

38 posted on 11/28/2022 4:40:27 AM PST by usconservative (When The Ballot Box No Longer Counts, The Ammunition Box Does. (What's In Your Ammo Box?))
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To: SeekAndFind

LOL!

Twitter NOW has a problem!?

China could/would/might kill 100,000,000 malcontents. With a population of 1.8 Billion it just doesn’t matter. And the world couldn’t do a thing about it.


39 posted on 11/28/2022 5:01:57 AM PST by LeonardFMason
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To: SeekAndFind

I spend time on Twitter - there’s actually a lot more stories about China’s tyranny than there used to be - maybe that’s what they’re crying about.


40 posted on 11/28/2022 5:31:20 AM PST by trebb (So many fools - so little time...)
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