The operation suggests Beijing’s political turmoil may be far more severe than analysts estimated.
Beijing is aggressively expanding its digital authoritarianism by flooding social media with pornography to hide internal turmoil, say experts, a strategy that threatens global internet liberty and sets a dangerous precedent for other regimes, they warn.
Nikita Bier, the head of product for X, said in a Jan. 30 post that the Chinese government floods X search results “with porn whenever there is political unrest” in a bid to block citizens from accessing live information.
The remarks from the social media site’s leadership emerged just days following the purge of two top-ranking Chinese generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli.
Bier also said the spam campaign originated from “5 million to 10 million accounts” that had been created on the site before he suspended new user registrations.
“This has been a difficult problem to solve, but we are aware and working on it,” he said.
Masking the Turmoil
Shen Ming-shih, a research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said this development demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is indeed facing severe political turmoil.
“Rumors escalate quickly in such a closed environment, so the regime has to resort to letting its cyber army post pornography as a diversion because it cannot leak other details to mask the political purge,” Shen told The Epoch Times.
Frank Tian Xie, John M. Olin Palmetto chair professor in business and professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina Aiken, said the massive scale of this spam operation suggests it’s part of a recurring state-sanctioned maneuver designed to distract the public.
“This is actually a long-standing trick of the CCP as the party orchestrated the Shen Chong case in the 1940s to drive a wedge between the Kuomintang and the U.S. military,” Xie told The Epoch Times.
“Its true intent now is merely to mask what is happening in China, namely the power struggle between military heavyweights and the political leadership.”
Xie referred to the 1946 “Shen Chong incident” as a historical precedent for such deception, noting that the CCP incited nationwide student protests over a fabricated rape accusation involving American soldiers.
This scheme was orchestrated by supporters of communism specifically to destabilize the then-ruling Kuomintang government in China.
Xie said this also indicates Beijing is deeply worried that the public might rise up or organize political protests before the dust settles on the internal infighting within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
“The authorities feel compelled to act because they fear voices supporting Zhang Youxia against Chinese President Xi Jinping’s dictatorship,” Xie said.
By Jarvis Lim
