A flurry of useless messages overwhelmed information about the protests in China on Twitter on Sunday.

For hours, according to the Washington Post, Chinese-language accounts spread spam with the names of the cities where people took to the streets.

So if you searched the social network for the Chinese names of the protest sites, you came across advertisements for escort services and other offers for adults.

According to the Washington Post, some of the accounts that shared the tweets had previously been inactive for months or years.

A recently resigned Twitter employee told the newspaper that accounts linked to the Chinese government have used similar techniques in the past.

Most of the time, however, it was about discrediting individual accounts or small groups by mentioning them in the erotic ads.

"This is a known issue that our team has been dealing with manually, aside from the automations we've put in place," the anonymous ex-employee said.

Thousands of employees were laid off on Twitter after it was taken over by billionaire Elon Musk.

Sunday's campaign is "another example of the fact that there are still bigger holes to be filled," the newspaper quotes.

All employees and analysts at Twitter who had previously dealt with the influence of the Chinese government had resigned.

Demonstrations continue

A China expert who works for the American government described the consequences of this on Sunday: "Fifty percent porn, 50 percent protests," he said.

"As soon as I scrolled into the feed 3-4 times to see the posts from earlier in the day, it was all porn."

Anger at the strict zero-Covid policy in China had led to nationwide protests in the past few days.

The trigger was a house fire in Urumqi in northwest China's Xinjiang region that killed ten people last Thursday.

The demonstrations in many cities continued on Monday night.

An unknown number of protesters were arrested.

In the early hours of the morning, a large contingent of police in the capital Beijing took action against hundreds of protesters near the diplomatic district.

As a symbol of resistance and protest against censorship, many demonstrators held up blank white sheets.

Slogans like “lift the lockdown” and “we don’t want PCR tests, we want freedom” were shouted.