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It’s laborious to know the final word motive of those accounts, however the in a single day transition exhibits that a minimum of one objective of such content material farming is to money out. Posting paid ads or promoting the account outright can quantity to a profitable enterprise.
If a pretend account fails to draw a following, it will possibly merely select a brand new identification and begin one other impersonating journey. That’s what occurred with one registered in March that alleged to be Fang Bin, a Chinese nationwide who was detained for 3 years for sharing details about covid’s impression within the early months. By May, the account had solely round 8,000 followers, so it deserted this identification, cycled by means of just a few different makes an attempt (together with “Anti-CCP Online User Alliance” and “Singaporean Delicious Food”), and settled on Cui Chenghao, a mysterious ethnic Korean blogger in China who has almost 5 million followers on Weibo.
The complete course of has been documented by different customers maintaining observe of the impersonator’s distinctive Twitter ID, which stays the identical no matter modifications to its identify and deal with. The final identification has been extra profitable than the earlier ones, securing this account 20,000 extra followers.
After the account of Luo Xiang was confirmed as pretend, Lu tried to name for folks to unfollow and report it, however reporting for impersonation often requires the sufferer to have an actual presence on Twitter. In most of those circumstances, the victims have little incentive to register a Twitter account simply to clear their identify, and reporting nearly by no means works. Twitter responded to a request for remark with its now-standard poop emoji.
Twitter has by no means been efficient at moderating content material that’s not in English, however the state of affairs seems to have worsened because the moderation groups have been laid off after Musk took over. Last 12 months, Chinese spam bots unfold so extensively that individuals suspected they’d the Chinese authorities’s help, nevertheless it was extra doubtless simply spammers making an attempt to generate profits.
While they don’t pose a lot direct risk to the viewers or to the particular person they faux to be, these content material farms are muddying the ecosystem of Chinese-language social media platforms, Lu says. By adopting clickbait—which in China usually means political content material—to realize followers, they’re polarizing the discourse in Chinese.
What different pretend Chinese celebrities have you ever noticed or suspected on Twitter? Let me know at zeyi@technologyreview.com.