Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter search results for major Chinese cities have become filled with tweets about escort services, porn, and gambling that are obscuring legitimate reports about a wave of protests that have gripped the country, Washington Post and TechCrunch are reporting. Searches for “北京” (Beijing) or “上海” (Shanghai) are filled with such spam which, as of this writing, vastly outnumber any tweets about the protests.
One analysis highlighted by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimates that over 95 percent of tweets under the Beijing search term are from spam accounts, with over 70 percent of the accounts only having started tweeting in such volumes recently. New spam tweets are appearing every few seconds from accounts that are tweeting…