Incident 411: Chinese Accounts Spammed Twitter Feed Allegedly to Obscure News of Protests

Description: Twitter Feed was flooded by content from Chinese-language accounts which allegedly aimed to manipulate and reduce social media coverage about widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions in China.

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Alleged: Twitter developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Twitter and Twitter Users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
411
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2022-11-27
Editors
Khoa Lam
Twitter grapples with Chinese spam obscuring news of protests
washingtonpost.com · 2022

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter's radically reduced anti-propaganda team grappled on Sunday with a flood of nuisance content in China that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against coronaviru…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.