How Twitter Bots Drowned Out Posts About Protests in China

Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, have recently vowed to crack down on bots. 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. For 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…