COVID-19 Protests in China Turns Twitter Upside Down

After increasing COVID-19 cases in China in recent days, the government has signed large-scale restrictions as part of the ‘zero COVID’ strategy. After the restrictions, protests started in China, twitter As always, it became the only platform where we could follow the protests moment by moment.

But when China’s major provinces such as Beijing and Shanghai were searched on Twitter, users encountered content other than protests. Twitter search results with adult content videos, escort site postings and betting sites advertisements it’s full.

The vast majority of shares were made from bot accounts:

• Air-Moving Device’s graphic has been translated into Turkish.

Analyzing the results using Twitter’s own developer interface, ‘Air-Moving Device’ made an analysis that is not very surprising. Accounts that make these posts More than 95% are from spam/bot accounts consisted of.

Moreover, 70% of these accounts started sharing only after the agenda was formed.

The agenda in China was reflected in Turkey and other countries with bot accounts:

The label “要要搞定個要”, one of the labels used in the protests, was also on the agenda in Turkey. Bot accounts from Turkey and abroad started to share under the hashtag.

We can see the same situation frequently in Turkey:

Any topic that is on the agenda in Turkey and that has started to be discussed on Twitter can also be used in our country. flooded by similar accounts. However, we can also see that irrelevant hashtags such as “#bornova” can be on the agenda with similar posts on Twitter at any time.

Of course, this is due to Twitter’s inability to get ahead of bot accounts yet. While the main focus of Twitter, which has passed under the management of Elon Musk, is now to destroy these accounts, we will only have to wait and see if this will result in success.