Twitter labels verified news agency ANI’s tweets about China as sensitive
As you all know there is border skirmish going on between India and China. We have already reported about the martyrdom of Indian Army soldiers. However, there is a totally different fight going on social media networks. We saw how Twitter banned Amul momentarily because of the cartoons made against China. A few days back we had described how Google was sucking up to China by removing anti-Chinese apps like Remove China App or barring the words like Communist Bandit and Falun on its platforms.
Now we have found that the microblogging giant Twitter is labeling verified news agency ANI’s tweets about China as sensitive. ANI or Asian News International is a well known News Agency and Smita Prakash is the chief editor at ANI. She noticed that Twitter was labeling ANI tweets as sensitive! But sensitive to whom? Twitter doesn’t even have a presence in China and ANI’s tweets were just a report of the protests being held against China in front of the Chinese embassy. IT is obvious that Twitter has some malafide interests in blocking genuine news handles, Here is a tweet from Smita Prakash and you determine yourself whether Twitter is as unbiased as it ought to be?
Twitter is shadow banning/censoring tweets on China even from verified news handles. One the left is a screen grab of the original tweet. On the right is what appears for some users. pic.twitter.com/umXWwFLHvJ
— Smita Prakash (@smitaprakash) June 17, 2020
It is time for Twitter to answer some tough questions regarding its moderation and labeling policies.