How Twitter Mistakes Affect Chinese Activists

SEOUL, South Korea — In November, Bao Pu, a veteran human rights activist visiting Beijing, posted videos of university protests on Twitter against strict Chinese stay-at-home orders against coronavirus. She gained more than 10,000 followers in the following weeks.

However, her friends and fellow activists were quick to tell her they were having trouble finding her posts, and even her account, on Twitter.

“I was shocked,” said Bao, a Hong Kong resident. He said he feared Twitter was “putting a cap on the influence” he might have.

More than 30 prominent Chinese dissidents and activists have faced similar visibility issues on Twitter in recent months, according to interviews with nine of them and screenshots of search results. The screenshots showed that the activists’ accounts did not appear after a Twitter search for their names, although imposter accounts did appear. Three of the dissidents said their accounts too had been suspended without warning and restored only after an appeal.

What Chinese activists found on Twitter is representative of problems that have plagued the social networking service since Elon Musk took over of the company in October. Musk has cut Twitter’s staff from 7,500 to 2,200 employees, leaving fewer staff available to oversee the company’s spam filters, handle user inquiries about their accounts and troubleshoot other issues, six people knowledgeable about the service said.

This caused issues across the platform. In November, following a turbulent election in Brazil, hashtags falsely claiming then-President Jair Bolsonaro had won the popular vote started trending on Twitter. Racist slurs have increased on the platform and child abuse images continue to proliferate, although Musk has vowed to clean the site of such material. On Wednesday, users around the world reported that they could no longer post or send messages, apparently new problems.

Problems also have silenced major Chinese voices on Twitter at a crucial political moment, despite Musk defending free speech. In November, protesters in dozens of Chinese cities opposed President Xi Jinping’s restrictive “zero COVID” policies, in some of the largest demonstrations in a generation.

The problems Chinese activists’ Twitter accounts were experiencing stemmed from errors in the company’s automated systems designed to filter spam and government disinformation campaigns, according to four people familiar with the service.

In the past, these systems were regularly monitored and errors were regularly fixed by staff. But a team that cleans up spam and thwarts influence operations, numbering nearly 50 people at its peak, a third of them in Asia, dropped to single digits due to recent layoffs and departures, Two of the insured persons. The division head for the Asia-Pacific region, whose responsibilities included Chinese activist accounts, was fired in January. Twitter’s resources dedicated to overseeing the moderation of Chinese-language post content have been drastically reduced.

So when some Twitter systems recently failed to distinguish between a Chinese disinformation campaign and authentic accounts, it was difficult to find some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents.

“It’s hard to be a Twitter user these days”said Jenn Takahashi, who runs the @bestofdyingtwit account, who has been tracking the platform’s shortcomings since Musk took the helm. She added that she also had trouble seeing tweets from people she was following, with notifications “delayed or sent twice” and direct messages filled with “so much spam”.

Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. In December, Musk acknowledged restrictions on the visibility of some users and announced plans to improve Twitter’s transparency in this regard.

Moderating in languages ​​other than English has been a particular challenge for US social media companies, which are often understaffed in those areas and rely on imperfect machine translations, said Gabriel Nicholas, a researcher at the Center for Democracy. & Technology studying content moderation and disinformation on social media.

“If Twitter makes mistakes in the Chinese language, it’s very likely that it will make mistakes in other languages ​​as well,” he said.

Twitter has long been banned in China. However, in recent years it was a meeting point for Chinese dissidentshuman rights activists and overseas Chinese communities seeking to discuss topics censored in mainland China.

During the November protests, Twitter was inundated with Chinese-language spam bots offering pornography, gambling sites, and escort services. a common tactic of the Chinese government to influence the type of information related to China what the outside world sees In recent months, the company’s automated systems have not been adequately maintained, allowing spam to rise and sometimes inadvertently limiting important Chinese accounts, according to four people.

According to findings collected Jan. 5 by Shadow Bird, a website that analyzes blocked accounts in Twitter search results, tweets from 30 Chinese dissident accounts did not appear in search results. (The website takes into account how search results change based on users’ location.)

This was underlined by some Chinese activists their Twitter accounts had been suspended for the past few weeks with no explanation.

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Wang Qingpeng, a Seattle human rights lawyer whose Twitter account was suspended on Dec. 15. “My account is neither liberal nor conservative. I never write in English and only focus on Chinese human rights issues.”

Wang, whose tweets were mostly about campaigning to raise awareness of Chinese political prisoners, said he appealed the suspension on Twitter but has not received a response. After ten days, the appeal link stopped working. His account was reinstated on Jan. 10, when Twitter sent him an email saying his account had been “incorrectly marked as junk.”

Several of the 30 Chinese activist accounts that had visibility issues reappeared in search results after The New York Times contacted Twitter.

Shen Liangqing, 60, a writer from the Anhui province of China who he spent more than six years in prison for his political activism, said she loves expressing her opinion on Twitter. But when his account was abruptly suspended in January, she reminded him of Chinese censorship, she said.

“If this platform blocks our accounts, we will lose a vehicle so our voice can be heard”he has declared.

c.2023 The New York Times Society