If you opened up Twitter on Sunday and tried to find this footage, footage of Chinese

protests against the government's extreme zero-Covid policies, something very curious would

have happened.

Keeping in the Chinese names of locations would not have yielded any video.

You'd see a lot of ads for escorts in your area.

Your area being Beijing or Shanghai or whatever city you were looking for, and you would

find nothing about the protests.

That's Joseph Mann, a veteran tech reporter for The Washington Post.

Sometimes the users had the names of the cities, so the person was named Shanghai or something

like that.

This was a way to make sure that it showed up high in the listings, but there were just

hundreds and hundreds of these.

This is some other adult stuff too, but it's mostly very repetitive, like the same few

over and over again.

What do we know about who created them?

This falls under the heading of reasonable speculation.

Who benefits?

I haven't seen analysis that traced the specific accounts to known government accounts.

There are some that had been dormant for years.

There are some that had just tweeted a few times, but not in several months, and then there

were some, you know, a whole bunch of new ones.

In the past, there have been spam floods that have been attributed to government or government

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