Against its own policy, Twitter no longer limits Chinese state media influence
The social media platform is now amplifying Chinese state media accounts and recommending their posts to users, which Twitter’s policy strictly says that it wouldn’t do.
After over two years of limiting the influence of Chinese state media accounts on the platform, Twitter has now removed many restrictions attached to these accounts and their posts.
Users have recently seen tweets from accounts labeled with “Chinese state-affiliated media” popping up on their “For you” page, where Twitter uses algorithm to recommend tweets that users might find interesting.
The “For you” page often includes tweets from accounts that users already follow. But during my testing, I found that some of the posts recommended to me were from state media accounts that I do not follow.
What Twitter is doing is exactly the opposite of what its policy on state-affiliated media accounts says.
The policy reads: “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people.”
By the time of this article’s publication, the policy is still up on Twitter’s website.
Twitter first implemented the policy of labeling state media accounts in 2020. In a blog post, Twitter wrote that “Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor.”
Other than not recommending these accounts and their tweets to users, Twitter also removed state media accounts from search results when users try to look for them. For example, searching “global times” on Twitter would not return tweets from the Global Times nor the account itself.
The labelings did effectively limit engagement numbers with Chinese state media accounts, according to a 2021 study by China Media Project.
Hu Xijin, commentator and former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, whose account was also labeled, famously lamented the restrictive policy because he was not gaining as many new followers as before.
But Twitter no longer hides state media tweets and accounts in search results. To test this, I created a burner account. When I typed “Peoples” in the search bar, Twitter automatically recommended People’s Daily’s account in suggestions. When I searched “Tsai Ing-wen” and “US China”, Twitter showed me as “top” result tweets from Chinese state media denouncing the Taiwan President’s visit to the US and tweets that linked to anti-US editorials, respectively.
In early 2022, Twitter started labeling tweets that contained links to Russian state media sites in the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Soon, Tweets that linked to Chinese state media sites were labeled as well.
The label reads: “Stay informed. This tweet links to a state affiliated media website.” When users tried to open the link, it would trigger Twitter to pop up another warning sign that advices caution.
But Twitter has halted this implementation as well. Tweets with links to state media sites no longer demonstrate any labels or signs.
I emailed Twitter to ask for clarifications as to why Twitter has seemingly removed restrictions on Chinese state media accounts, only to receive a poop emoji as an auto reply. Elon Musk tweeted on March 19 that auto replying a poop emoji would be a standard practice of its press email account going forward.
Twitter’s decision to label and restrict all Chinese media accounts had received criticism in the past. Experts and journalists pointed out that, although every media outlet in China is technically backed by the government, outlets like the Sixth Tone and Caixin, whose reportings are relatively closer to Western style journalism, do not operate in the same way that mouthpieces like the People’s Daily and Xinhua do.
Chinese state media accounts and personalities have repeatedly called for the removal of labels and restrictions of their content ever since Elon Musk announced that he would buy Twitter last year.
Chen Weihua, the EU bureau chief of China Daily, once tweeted to Musk: “This is totally discriminatory and suppression of free speech. Twitter must change such policy.”
Access to Twitter is blocked in China. While Chinese officials and media get to propagate the voice of the Chinese government on the platform, ordinary Chinese citizens have to use VPNs to bypass the firewall in order to use the app. Some VPN users and providers were persecuted by the authorities.
Twitter is about to launch a new verification system, where only users who paid for the service Twitter Blue can obtain or retain the blue checks. Experts had worried that Chinese state media accounts and personalities could use the service to circumvent Twitter’s restrictions of their influence.
The disappearing of restrictions could just be a system glitch or bug. Since Musk slashed Twitter’s workforce after he had taken over the company, many users have reported technical problems.
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