The head of product at X (formerly Twitter) has accused the Chinese government of flooding the app’s search results “with porn whenever there is political unrest — to prevent their citizens from finding out real-time information.”
“They [China] have a pool of 5-10 million accounts that were registered before I locked down signup,” Nikita Bier said in a post on X on Friday. He joined the company as head of product in July 2025.
According to Twitter’s former leadership, coordinated, state-backed Chinese networks emerged on the platform around 2019 and 2020. In 2019, Twitter identified 936 accounts aimed at sowing political discord in Hong Kong. The next year, Twitter disclosed 23,750 accounts belonging to a “highly engaged core network” and roughly 150,000 amplifier accounts designed to boost their content. “In general, this entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities,” Twitter wrote in June 2020. “They were Tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China.”
These routine disclosures of state-linked accounts stopped after Tesla-founder Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022. Within a month of taking over, Musk had slashed Twitter’s staff by more than half. The entire team dedicated to countering foreign influence operations was fired or quit, The Washington Post reported at the time.
In late November 2022, researchers noticed that Chinese-language searches for major cities in China were turning up a flood of spammy posts related to escort and other adult services. Some linked the spam to the Chinese government, since it seemed to serve a political purpose by distracting and drowning out news of widespread protests against Beijing’s zero-Covid policies. These protests escalated in Urumqi, Xinjiang, spreading to other major cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Guangzhou.
Although Twitter was banned in China in 2009, the app can still be accessed with a virtual private network, or VPN, which routes one’s internet traffic to a server located in a different location. If a user in China connects to the internet via a server located in, say, New York, they can circumvent the Great Firewall and operate more freely on platforms like X.
X plays a vital role in facilitating the spread of information into and out of China’s tightly-controlled digital space. “The importance of X for Chinese human rights defenders cannot be over-estimated,” Human Rights in China, an organization founded in 1989 by overseas Chinese students and scientists, wrote last year. Chinese alternatives are heavily censored, and non-Chinese alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky do not have significant reach.
But X can also be used by networks of commercial bots seeking to turn a profit by selling adult content to Chinese audiences in a relatively tolerant environment. Reporting by The New York Times and the Stanford Internet Observatory in a now-deleted post concluded that the surge in these Chinese language posts with videos or images featuring adult content that occurred around the zero-Covid protests in November 2022 was likely a coincidence, citing the fact that it started slightly before the protests. And while state-backed networks similarly use swarms of bots to overwhelm search results, those campaigns typically reflect Chinese Communist Party messaging.
Researchers have relied on Twitter disclosures, machine learning and activity analysis in order to infer patterns in Chinese state-backed influence networks. But now there might be a new way for the broader public to identify Beijing-linked accounts. In November, Domino Theory reported on a new X feature that reveals the true location of user accounts. The “About This Account” section in each profile page shows where an account was made and the current location of the user based on aggregated IP addresses. If a VPN is being used, then X will say the account is “based in” wherever the server is located. Bier, X’s head of product, said this feature is “99.99% accurate.”
Genuine accounts located in China connect to X using a VPN because access to the app is blocked by the Great Firewall. These accounts will typically say that the user is “connected via the Chinese Android app store” but they are currently “based in” Hong Kong, Taiwan, or other places with free access to X.
What is surprising about this new feature is not that people in China appear to be using VPNs, but rather that some accounts are “based in” China, meaning that they are connecting without a VPN from IP addresses located in China. This shouldn’t be possible for normal users. The Epoch Times, a newspaper tied to the Falun Gong religious movement, and Human Rights in China, a New York-based NGO, reasoned that accounts “based in” China have likely been given direct access to X from Beijing.
Something Twitter said back in 2019, when it began disclosing Chinese state-backed accounts, seems to confirm this. “As Twitter is blocked in PRC, many of these accounts accessed Twitter using VPNs. However, some accounts accessed Twitter from specific unblocked IP addresses originating in mainland China,” the company wrote on its blog, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
Domino Theory previously reported on dozens of accounts that are “based in” China and devoted to sharing positive images and stories from Xinjiang. This was done using a database called Based in China. Another search found many more such accounts pushing Communist Party narratives. A search in simplified Chinese characters for “钓鱼岛,” referring to the Japanese-administered Diaoyutai islands that China claims as its own, revealed posts published between December 31 and February 1 from at least 12 accounts that are “based in” China. “Public opinion is overwhelmingly one-sided: anime can be ditched, sovereignty cannot be yielded!” (民意更是一边倒：动漫可弃，主权不让!) wrote one account.
Searches of various Chinese political or military figures like Miao Hua (苗華) or He Hongjun (何宏軍) also reveal years of posts from accounts “based in” China. These posts tended to cluster around specific days that state media was reporting on a particular individual. Ostensibly separate accounts sometimes post the same text.
Overall, the “based in” China accounts that Domino Theory found tend to post many times a day, usually to regurgitate CCP messaging and sometimes on seemingly trivial topics. One account posted a comedic video a couple of days ago of a soldier pouring liquid over the emperor of the Ming dynasty. The caption: “Jokes can be made, but one should distinguish what matters most and clearly recognize who is ruler and who is subject” (玩笑可以开，但应该分清楚主次，认清楚君臣).
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