Twitter blocks Chinese dissidents ahead of Tiananmen annivesary
- 5 years ago
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter suspended a large number of Chinese dissident accounts just days before the most politically sensitive period of the year in China.
The New York Times reports that June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
In China, Big Brother keeps the seal extra tight on 'that sensitive period in June,' which means several extra doses of censorship from the Great Firewall.
So when the accounts of prominent and long-time critics of the Beijing government suddenly dropped off the face of Twitter, everyone assumed it was the Chinese censors.
According to the New York Times, over a hundred users got the cut- from human rights lawyers, activists, and nationalists, to even college students.
The reasoning made sense, since Beijing's internet po-po had been carrying out a campaign way before June 4 that targeted Chinese Twitter users, who often used VPNs to work around China's Twitter block.
But as it turns out, it wasn't China- or so says Twitter. Supposedly, the purge was all part of routine Twitter efforts to "stop spam and inauthentic behavior."
According to TechCrunch, the company claimed in a statement that Chinese authorities hadn't mass reported the accounts. Instead, it seemed Twitter was cleaning CCP bots and accidentally suspended a whole lotta anti-CCP accounts.
That doesn't quite make sense, and people online think so too.
Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the U.S. based publication "China Change" said in a tweet she thinks something else is going on, and speculated that the "routine process" may have been abused by someone on the payroll.
The New York Times reports that June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
In China, Big Brother keeps the seal extra tight on 'that sensitive period in June,' which means several extra doses of censorship from the Great Firewall.
So when the accounts of prominent and long-time critics of the Beijing government suddenly dropped off the face of Twitter, everyone assumed it was the Chinese censors.
According to the New York Times, over a hundred users got the cut- from human rights lawyers, activists, and nationalists, to even college students.
The reasoning made sense, since Beijing's internet po-po had been carrying out a campaign way before June 4 that targeted Chinese Twitter users, who often used VPNs to work around China's Twitter block.
But as it turns out, it wasn't China- or so says Twitter. Supposedly, the purge was all part of routine Twitter efforts to "stop spam and inauthentic behavior."
According to TechCrunch, the company claimed in a statement that Chinese authorities hadn't mass reported the accounts. Instead, it seemed Twitter was cleaning CCP bots and accidentally suspended a whole lotta anti-CCP accounts.
That doesn't quite make sense, and people online think so too.
Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the U.S. based publication "China Change" said in a tweet she thinks something else is going on, and speculated that the "routine process" may have been abused by someone on the payroll.