Foreign Ministry Spokespeople Atwitter Over American Social Media Bans
Posted by Joseph Brouwer | Jan 22, 2021
A new investigation by China Media Project revealed how Twitter’s decision to label certain Chinese accounts as “state-affiliated” throttled their reach, curbing China’s “borrowed boat” propaganda strategy yet also impacting independent Chinese media outlets. In August of 2020, Twitter attached labels to accounts connected to the Chinese, French, Russian, U.K., or U.S. governments and stopped boosting the reach of their posts by removing them from search bar recommendations. Chinese state-backed accounts had taken to Twitter to spread messages both benign, such as images of pandas, and pernicious, including denialism about the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. At China Media Project, Kevin Schoenmakers and Claire Liu investigated