Thread by @BenDoBrown

Over the past 20 minutes, almost 2000 tweets have been uploaded using the hashtags of major Chinese cities (such as #杭州), all with the text "I'm single, can I get a husband on Twitter".

All of the accounts have been made in the past two months, and have zero or few followers.

This is happening during a very interesting period.

Namely, while content about the protests in China is being posted on Twitter, using the hashtags of the cities as place markers.

Here's some context on those protests bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi…

I've downloaded a full csv of the past 2000 tweets using #杭州线下 (Hangzhou offline).

The phrases appear to be quite odd. Some mentioning Pokemon...

Hit me up if you want the csv.

The timeline of posts is fairly linear - at least of the 2000 tweets I collected under the #杭州线下 hashtag. But there is barely any engagement on any of the tweets, no retweets, comments or likes, showing that these posts, while there, are not gaining any traction at all.

There is no clear evidence that this spammy behaviour is linked to the protests in China, but it does show that while there are important topics posted on Twitter, they are being blocked by spammy behaviour that uses the same location based hashtags, obscuring important content.