![]() Yet among Chinese-language content on Twitter, the bots appear to maintain a significant presence. Musk suggested that the company was being too aggressive in banning bots, suspending some legitimate accounts in the process. In a letter posted to Twitter announcing her resignation this month, she wrote that the “safety and well-being” of Twitter users was in decline, adding that “shooting from the hip is not how you do content moderation.” “I almost feel like it’s the Wild West,” Eirliani Rahman, a former member of the Trust and Safety Council, said in an interview. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. In an internal email about the decision to end the Trust and Safety Council, the company said it would be “moving faster and more aggressively” to make Twitter safer, but provided no details on its plans. He also dissolved the company’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group formed in 2016 to address hate speech and other problems on Twitter. Musk, who took over Twitter a month before the protests began, has said that controlling bots is an “ absolute top priority.” But in the weeks since acquiring the company, he cut Twitter’s work force by about half. Twitter suspended many of the accounts, but the spam continued as other bots kept tweeting, he wrote in the report. Thiel reviewed millions of tweets by searching for 30 Chinese cities and found that bots were active before the protests began and continued after they had ebbed. The Times analysis matched findings published on Monday by David Thiel, the chief technologist at the Stanford Internet Observatory. ![]() Only the English searches were free from spam bots. The Times also searched for six city names outside of China using English and simplified Chinese. When contacted, two businesses that appeared in spam tweets said that they had purchased the tweets using advertising services. ![]() Bots were active throughout, the analysis found, even for cities where protests were not held. The Times searched on Twitter for 10 Chinese cities, like “北京” (“Beijing”), and reviewed the results for spam. 25, according to an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of tweets, interviews with people behind some of the bot accounts and a report by a researcher at Stanford University. Much of the spam is linked to commercial bot networks that have operated on Chinese-language Twitter since before the protests began on Nov. But the flood of spam for Chinese users in recent weeks has underscored the challenges the company faces in policing fraudulent and inauthentic activity, especially in foreign languages that have traditionally been more loosely policed by large American social media platforms.įor many Chinese who turned to the platform as demonstrations against Covid-19 restrictions had grown political and widespread - more so than any protests there in decades - the experience of using the app appeared to capture a different reality. Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, have recently vowed to crack down on bots. ![]()
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