MC Weekly Update 11/28: Alex the Demon Overlord

As protestors against China’s zero-Covid policy fill the streets, images of them fill the internet and China’s censors are struggling to contain them. – Liza Lin, Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal

This is partly because the Chinese people have had years of practice at evading censors and know a trick or two. – Paul Mozur / Twitter

So China is trying to bury that content with its own spam about escorts, porn and gambling. – Jon Porter / The Verge

Some of that spam includes … an AI-generated image of Alex with horns? – Alex Stamos / Twitter

Elon doesn’t seem too concerned though. He’s too busy picking a fight with Apple. – Elon Musk / Twitter

And maybe drawing up plans for his own phone if Apple kicks Twitter out of the app store? – Elon Musk / Twitter

Meta published its quarterly adversarial threat report this week, which included information about accounts it took down conducting information operations that had links to the US government. – Meta

Alex walks us through the report Stanford Internet Observatory wrote with Graphika on these operations and what they found. – Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory
As a result of this report, the Pentagon ordered a review of information operations conducted by the US military. – Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post

Alex gives Evelyn an apparently now-weekly update on Stanford football news.