Information operations directed at Hong Kong

The elephant left standing in the room is not the spam and bot accounts, but the official, state-actor accounts such as Xinhua News that pay for promoted tweets carrying the same message.

Granted this is likely beyond the scope of Twitter’s safety team, but this completely sidesteps the issues raised here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/twitter-is-blocked-in-chin...

See https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi..., which was posted to the Twitter blog at approximately the same time as this post.

Yes basically this is a state sponsored misinformation campaign.

Very curious which entities get blocked by this policy.

Fox News? The Telegraph?

So, wait...is the BBC no longer allowed to advertise upcoming shows on Twitter?

It’s in the article, you should read the content as your comment is coming off partisan.

Perhaps you know more than I about how different news orgs are funded and can contribute afterwards.

it’s in TFA

“This policy will apply to news media entities that are either financially or editorially controlled by the state. It has been informed by established academic and civil society leaders in this space. Sources include Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, the European Journalism Centre’s Media Landscapes Report, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and UNESCO's framework to assess media development and independence.”

Fox News is not controlled by the state (if anything it’s the other way round)

Neither is the telegraph

Neither is the BBC

They might not be able to pay for ads, but they could still use their Twitter accounts:

>Any affected accounts will be free to continue to use Twitter to engage in public conversation, just not our advertising products.

I was confused about this part too, but that link does have this:

> This policy will not apply to taxpayer-funded entities, including independent public broadcasters.

Britain's BBC, Canada's CBC, and the US PBS should be covered by that.

Actually, what's to stop China from making their news agency tax-payer funded to take advantage of this exception?

The BBC is financially controlled by the state. The Telegraph has nothing to do with the state, however.

How about state media that is already taxpayer-funded? Do they really get an exception here?

I thought the BBC was independent. However, "BBC licence fee receipts and expenditure: The Treasury manages public spending within two ‘control totals’ of about equal size..." https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...

The quote in my comment has "independent public broadcasters". I think they will depend on third parties in order to make that determination.

State is a group of people. How about marketing campaign? Companies are also groups of people too. What I see here is twitter bending its rules to not work with certain groups of people based on their own definition of whether it is state sponsored.

Wonder what they do about republicans or democats launching twitter compaigns. Will they get banned as well?

I smell the inconsistencies in applying the rules to US vs. the rest of the world.

That was my assumption as well. I can't imagine they'd put the North Korean state broadcasters on the same level as BBC or CBC.