It’s hard to know the ultimate motive of these accounts, but the overnight transition shows that at least one goal of such content farming is to cash out. Posting paid advertisements or selling the account outright can amount to a lucrative business.
If a fake account fails to attract a following, it can simply choose a new identity and start another impersonating adventure. That’s what happened with one registered in March that alleged to be Fang Bin, a Chinese national who was detained for three years for sharing information about covid’s impact in the early months. By May, the account had only around 8,000 followers, so it abandoned this identity, cycled through a few other attempts (including “Anti-CCP Online User Alliance” and “Singaporean Delicious Food”), and settled on Cui Chenghao, a mysterious ethnic Korean blogger in China who has nearly 5 million followers on Weibo.
The whole process has been documented by other users keeping track of the impersonator’s unique Twitter ID, which stays the same regardless of changes to its name and handle. The last identity has been more successful than the previous ones, securing this account 20,000 additional followers.
After the account of Luo Xiang was confirmed as fake, Lu tried to call for people to unfollow and report it, but reporting for impersonation usually requires the victim to have a real presence on Twitter. In most of these cases, the victims have little incentive to register a Twitter account just to clear their name, and reporting almost never works. Twitter responded to a request for comment with its now-standard poop emoji.
Twitter has never been effective at moderating content that’s not in English, but the situation appears to have worsened since the moderation teams were laid off after Musk took over. Last year, Chinese spam bots spread so widely that people suspected they had the Chinese government’s support, but it was more likely just spammers trying to make money.
While they don’t pose much direct threat to the audience or to the person they pretend to be, these content farms are muddying the ecosystem of Chinese-language social media platforms, Lu says. By adopting clickbait—which in China often means political content—to gain followers, they are polarizing the discourse in Chinese.
What other fake Chinese celebrities have you spotted or suspected on Twitter? Let me know at zeyi@technologyreview.com.