“Once I got 3 to 4 scrolls into the feed… all porn.” “50 percent porn, 50 percent protests,” one anonymous US government contractor and China expert described their Twitter feed to WaPo. Overwhelming keyword searches for major cities like Shanghai, Urumqi, and Chengdu with NSFW content makes it much more difficult for people looking for reliable realtime information on developing events in those areas. As one ex-staffer told WaPo, among the many staff cuts and department shutterings included the resignation of “all the China influence operations and analysts,” leaving a massive blindspot across the country. Musk more than halved the company’s global workforce from 7,500 to just over 2,000 since assuming leadership, a reduction many experts and former employees warn opens up one of the world’s most popular social media platforms to numerous content, engineering, and security issues. Yesterday, Twitter also suffered from a largely un-flagged proliferation of re-uploaded videos of the deadly 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

First highlighted by multiple security researchers over the weekend and subsequently confirmed by The Washington Post this morning, the situation is only the most recent example of Twitter’s dangerously strained oversight and maintenance capabilities in the wake of Elon Musk’s dramatic $44 billion acquisition and internal shakeup last month.

As a wave of unprecedented citizen protests over China’s revived “ zero COVID” response spread throughout major cities, so did an overwhelming flood of “Not Safe For Work” (NSFW) spam posts from what appear to be countless, long-dormant Twitter bot accounts.

Christchurch shooting video nsfw