Twitter Status Report: NY Post Still Locked Out. China’s Blue-Checked Propagandist Still Tweeting.

Hotair ^ | 10/22/2020 | Ed Morrissey

[SeekAndFind]

Thank goodness our social-media superiors keep us safe from disinformation! The New York Post’s insistence on tweeting out their original reporting on Hunter Biden’s e-mails resulted in Twitter locking their account on October 14th, along with a number of other users. Supposedly this was imposed because the NYP and others were retweeting misinformation, trying to work around a block imposed on the story’s URL.

A week later, the NY Post’s account is still locked — even though the Bidens have never directly disputed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s e-mail. It’s still locked even though the Post now reports independent corroboration from one of the e-mail addressees. This, we have been told, is to protect us from election-season misinformation.

But now for the good news — not everyone’s account has been locked! Thanks to the Twitter demi-gods, we can still get our steady diet of the View From Beijing, thanks to Lijian Zhao, a propagandist known enough to Twitter to have a “fact check” imposed on him in May. We’ll get back to that in a moment, but here’s what Zhao is retweeting this morning:

The US' ranking on the World Press Freedom Index has been dropping for 3 consecutive years since 2017. The US Press Freedom Tracker shows in 2019 alone, there were 28 instances in the US where journalists were denied access to government public events.

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) October 22, 2020

That’s big talk … from a country ranked 177th on the same listing. China ranks below Cuba on Reporters Without Borders’ report for 2020, while the US ranks 45th. Only North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Eritrea rank worse than China. As an example of why China gets that rating, Twitter can’t even operate in China; the regime locks it out to keep too much information from reaching its subjects. China’s regime uses Twitter strictly for foreign dissemination of propaganda, and yet “Twitter Safety” seems perfectly at ease with this.

Zhao has also used Twitter to disseminate “misinformation,” including a bogus attempt to shift responsibility for COVID-19 to the US Army:

This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US. https://t.co/LPanIo40MR

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 13, 2020

That went too far even for the Beijing regime, which swatted Zhao publicly over this allegation. Two months later, Twitter finally got around to doing a half-assed “fact check” on this tweet from Zhao, which is why it now has a “get the facts” link attached to it. But Zhao’s still able to access his account, and the Beijing regime still uses Twitter for its propaganda campaign, right up to the moment.

Meanwhile, a American newspaper that has been in continuous publication since its founding by Alexander Hamilton remains unable to access its Twitter account. This results from the crime of having reported a story critical of Joe Biden and his son, corroborated now, and their connections to … China. Twitter appears to be protecting some people, but it’s not their users, and it’s not from misinformation and propaganda.

[ronnie raygun]

twitter google and facebook need to be disbanded