Thread: I found data fraud in multiple clinical trials for generic drugs in China.
I've seen limited coverage outside China of the recent controversy over 集采 — centralized procurement of drugs, especially generics. It is a hugely important issue close to my heart. Generic drugs, which have dominated the bidding process, have come under scrutiny for quality-related issues, which were raised by some patients and medical professionals.

As background, see Yicai (Chinese) [yicai.com/news/102447256…], Xinhua (English) [english.news.cn/20250120/13f1b…]

Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you'll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. I searched for 北京 (Beijing) today (11/28 ~5am Beijing time) and identified accounts with tweets that show up in the "Latest" search results.
Vast majority (>95%) of these are spam accounts. They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.

A thread on TikTok-Douyin decoupling (or lack thereof) thru some fun OSINT sleuthing:
Having read recent reports on ties between TikTok and DouYin(/Bytedance), which mostly relied on indirect evidence, I wanted to see if I could find some more direct data. (1/n) Last year, I stumbled upon a group of TikTok accounts used by China-based Bytedance software/testing engineers to test various aspects of the app. This week, I expanded the list to ~1,300 by looking at accounts followed by/following known accounts. (2/n)

Back to this analysis, I’ll admit it is quick and dirty: I got the idea at 2AM and stayed up till 4 to make the graph. Of course there are caveats, many of them I addressed in the original tweet.

But some other caveats/criticism: 1. Correlation is not causation.

Great point, and definitely something I thought about. It is difficult to properly show causation using complex, real-world data like this. Definitely something to try. But in the meantime...

Trump's insistence on saying "Chinese virus" is normalizing and encouraging racism. Here is the data.

I plotted the number of tweets & replies (excluding RT) that use specific racial slurs in the past week, and saw an increase after Trump first tweeted "Chinese virus" (3/17 7p). When the Commander-in-Chief is spewing out racist, xenophobic BS and refusing to back down, people are of course emboldened to do the same, both on Twitter and in the real world.

washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03…

https://twitter.com/JiayangFan/status/1240111033550766080?s=20