Twitter Takes Down Accounts of China Dissidents Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/twitter-china-tiananmen.html
Yet the culprit was not Chinese censors but Twitter’s own overactive filters.
In a statement, Twitter said that as a part of its routine efforts to stop spam and inauthentic behavior, it had inadvertently gone after a number of legitimate Chinese-language accounts.
“These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was routine action on our part,” the company said in a statement on Twitter. “Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize.”
Online, many users said they did not believe Twitter’s statement told the whole story. One human rights lawyer, whose account had been taken down, said that in protest he tweeted an image of Twitter’s bird mascot colored red with five yellow stars to evoke the Chinese flag.
In the past, Twitter has come under fire for its political tone deafness, especially overseas. After the United Nations found that deliberate social media manipulation helped encourage a genocide in Myanmar, Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, chose the country as the destination for a meditation retreat. While there, he declined to meet with organizers who were fighting violent propaganda and dangerous rumors spread on the platform.
Twitter said that all users in China who had their accounts recently suspended should be able to recover them, though a day later, some accounts remained locked, according to Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website dedicated to writings on civil society and human rights.
“I do believe Twitter is trying to do good,” Ms. Cao said. “No questions about that. But the results are mixed.”