But this spam may have had nothing to do with the Chinese government, in accordance with a report published Monday by the Stanford Internet Observatory. “While the spam has drowned out legitimate protest-related content, there is no evidence that it was created to do so, nor that it was a deliberate effort by the Chinese government,” wrote David Thiel, author of the report.
Instead, they were most likely the usual commercial spambots that plague Twitter forever. These particular accounts exist to attract the attention of Chinese users who go to foreign networks to access porn.
Therefore, “significant rise” in spam was just a coincidence? Short answer: very likely. There are two main reasons Thiel doesn’t believe the bots are connected to the Chinese government.
first of all these accounts have been spamming for a long time. And they sent out even more tweets and more consistently, earlier protests erupted, according to an analysis of data on the activity of more than 600,000 accounts between November 15 and 29. Another analysis shows that they also continued to send spam even as discussion of the protests died down.
Check out these two charts (for reference, the protests peaked on November 27):
So he did it simply to feel as if spam activity broke out during the protests? This chart shows that significantly more bot accounts were created in November:
But Thiel stresses that content moderation takes time. People tend to ignore an effect called “survivor bias”: old spam and accounts are constantly being removed from the platform, but researchers don’t have data on suspended accounts. Therefore, a graph like this only shows accounts that survived Twitter spam filters. That’s why the November surge looks so big: these are new accounts that were created very recently to replace their dead counterparts, and they still exist, but not all of them will survive, so they wouldn’t be there if we revisited this chart in, say, a few months. In other words, if you were to analyze the data immediately after the protests, it would definitely be it seems what this kind of spam started recently. But this is not necessarily the complete truth.
secondly, if the spam accounts were meant to bury information about the protests, they did a pretty bad job. While the escort ad spam featured the names of many Chinese cities as keywords and hashtags, Thiel found that they did not target hashtags actually used to discuss the protests, such as #A4Revolution or # ChinaProtest2022, “is something you’d think the government would be interested in if they tried to keep things quiet,” he tells me. Of the 30,000 or so tweets he analyzed containing these more influential hashtags, “there’s no spam.”
