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Information operations directed at Hong Kong

(blog.twitter.com)
1116 points whatok | 5 comments | 19 Aug 19 18:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mortenjorck ◴[19 Aug 19 19:00 UTC] No.20740690[source]▶
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...

replies(2): >>20740717 #>>20740809 #
martey ◴[19 Aug 19 19:03 UTC] No.20740717[source]▶
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.
replies(3): >>20740858 #>>20740952 #>>20742546 #
CobrastanJorji ◴[19 Aug 19 19:27 UTC] No.20740952[source]▶
So, wait...is the BBC no longer allowed to advertise upcoming shows on Twitter?
replies(2): >>20741116 #>>20741203 #
1. tareqak ◴[19 Aug 19 19:54 UTC] No.20741203[source]▶
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?

replies(2): >>20741670 #>>20743975 #
2. noarchy ◴[19 Aug 19 20:48 UTC] No.20741670[source]▶
How about state media that is already taxpayer-funded? Do they really get an exception here?
replies(1): >>20742069 #
3. tareqak ◴[19 Aug 19 21:39 UTC] No.20742069[source]▶
The quote in my comment has "independent public broadcasters". I think they will depend on third parties in order to make that determination.
replies(1): >>20742997 #
4. noarchy ◴[20 Aug 19 00:54 UTC] No.20742997{3}[source]▶
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.
5. ◴[20 Aug 19 05:02 UTC] No.20743975[source]▶