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. 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. 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. “50 percent porn, 50 percent protests,” one anonymous US government contractor and China expert described their Twitter feed to WaPo. “Once I got 3 to 4 scrolls into the feed… [it was] all porn.” “Search the name of any major city in Chinese… and you’ll see thousands of nsfw escort ads,” Mengyu Dong, a Stanford University researcher, tweeted on Sunday. Dong continued by explaining that, although similar ads have existed for years, they have not been shared nearly as frequently as over this past weekend, and recent posts often came from years’ long dormant accounts. Analysis from another account specializing in publicly available Chinese data seemed to show that suspected spam accounts at one point comprised over 95 percent of the “Latest” results after searching “Beijing” in Chinese, adding that, “They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.” On Friday, Musk tweeted screenshots of presentation slides he claimed were from a recent “company talk,” one of which included the caption “Reported impersonation spiked, then fell” alongside a line graph citing “Twitter Internal” data.
