Search results of current widespread protests opposing oppressive COVID lockdown measures in major cities across China were drowned out last weekend by Chinese bots advertising pornography, escort services, and gambling.

Air-Moving Device, a Twitter account analyzing China through data graphs, showed charts indicating footage of widespread protests in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities were nearly hidden from Chinese citizens to access information about the mass demonstrations.

Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you'll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. pic.twitter.com/Ao46g2ILzf

— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022

“Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets,” the outlet said, sharing data retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory.

Chinese citizens flooded the streets after the Chinese Communist Party’s “Zero COVID” policy prevented firefighters from rescuing residents locked inside a burning apartment building in Urumqi, leaving at least ten people dead.

The growing conflict between the government and the Chinese people has accelerated in recent weeks after some cities and provinces endured more than 100 days of severe lockdowns of China’s “Zero COVID” policy, despite just 38,000 people testing positive for the coronavirus among a population of over 1.4 billion.

Chinese Communist Party authorities have fenced in residents across the country with limited opportunities to travel while other provinces have implemented such lockdowns for more than three straight months as the nation’s pandemic policies extend into its third year, sparking citizen’s demands for Communist Party authoritarians to resign.

Mengyu Dong, a student data journalist at Stanford University, shared images of some ads, saying some of the accounts “have been dormant for years, only to become active … after protests broke out in China.”

Chinese bots are flooding Twitter with *escort ads*, possibly to make it more difficult for Chinese users to access information about the mass protests. Some of these acts have been dormant for years, only to become active yesterday after protests broke out in China. for example: pic.twitter.com/QRYLQu09Pq

— Mengyu Dong (@dong_mengyu) November 27, 2022

In a series of tweets, Dong showed various inactive accounts created as far back as 2015, flooding the social media platform with thousands of tweets within 24 hours.

The Washington Post reports that an anonymous U.S. government contractor and China expert said search results showed 50% porn and 50% protests while scrolling for news and images of the protests.

“Once I got three-to-four scrolls into the feed,” it was “all porn,” the contractor said.

A former Twitter employee told The Washington Post the platform has used suspected government-connected accounts have used similar techniques in the past.

“This is a known problem that our team was dealing with manually, aside from automations we put in place,” said the anonymous former employee.

The employee added the mass tweet campaign “was another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill” after the “China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”

A current anonymous Twitter employee told an outside researcher that the company was aware of the problem.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that the platform experienced slight service “degradation” on Sunday from an old 3rd party tool used to block accounts with no rate limit, which some users believe may have contributed to the issue.

“Should be fixed now,” he added.

Twitter experienced slight degradation of service today from an old 3rd party tool used to block accounts that had no rate limit (sigh). Should be fixed now.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Bloomberg reports Apple Inc. allegedly limited it’s AirDrop wireless file-sharing feature on iPhones in China to prevent protestors sending documents, images, and videos in their latest iOS version released last week, which caps non-contacts from receiving files at 10 minutes.

Dillon Burroughs contributed to this report.

Chinese police arrested a journalist for the BBC who was covering the massive protests that were breaking out across the country in responses to the communist nation’s draconian coronavirus lockdown measures.

The protests reportedly began on Thursday after ten people were killed in a fire at a residential high-rise building in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang autonomous region. Videos of the incident posted on social media spawned accusations that lockdowns contributed to the deaths, the New York Times and Reuters reported. Residents of the city have been locked down and prevented from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days at a time, Reuters added.

Outside Shanghai, major cities and college campuses were also the scenes of major protests. Reuters reported that demonstrations broke out in the cities of Wuhan, Chengdu, Lanzhou, and Beijing on Sunday. Protests in Wuhan reportedly turned violent, with demonstrators smashing through metal barricades, overturning testing tents, and demanding an end to lockdowns. The New York Times reported another protest in the city of Korla in northern Xinjiang.

Journalist Edward Lawrence, who has since been released, was seen being roughed up by the Chinese police in videos that went viral on social media.

Shanghai, BBC reporter Edward Lawrence was randomly arrested by Chinese police.#TheGreatTranslationMovement pic.twitter.com/PMq8rHszlm

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动官方推号 (@TGTM_Official) November 27, 2022

The BBC released a statement saying that it was “extremely concerned” about the deteriorating situation in China and how the nation’s authorities were treating reporters.

“The BBC is extremely concerned about the treatment of our journalist Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering the protests in Shanghai,” the publication said. “He was held for several hours before being released. During his arrest, he was beaten and kicked by the police. This happened while he was working as an accredited journalist.”

“It is very worrying that one of our journalists was attacked in this way whilst carrying out his duties,” the statement continued. “We have had no official explanation or apology from the Chinese authorities, 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 statement from the BBC on what happened to me in Shanghai last night while doing my job.

I understand at least one local national was arrested after trying to stop the police from beating me.

Thanks very much for the kind words and messages of concern. https://t.co/weoDAMakvO

— Edward Lawrence (@EP_Lawrence) November 28, 2022

Lawrence posted another video since the incident where he showed police were forcing people to show authorities their phones and then were forcing those people to delete photos and videos from the protests.

People being forced to delete photos by the police today at the of the last two days of protests #shanghai #china pic.twitter.com/VS1kFSoh3x

— Edward Lawrence (@EP_Lawrence) November 28, 2022

John Rigolizzo contributed to this report.