Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) are calling on Twitter to ban Chinese Communist Party officials from the platform over misinformation about the Wuhan Coronavirus.
“By banning Twitter in China, the Chinese Communist Party is keeping its citizens in the dark. By putting propaganda on Twitter, the Chinese Communist Party is lying to the rest of the world,” wrote the GOP legislators, in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
“It is clear that Chinese Communist Party officials are using twitter to disseminate propaganda in the midst of a dangerous global crisis,” argued Sen. Sasse and Rep. Gallagher. “Even worse, this propaganda obscures and confuses users over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially undermines efforts to contain and control the outbreak. We believe this behavior more than warrants their removal from the platform.”
Last week, Twitter ramped up its policies around coronavirus misinformation, even declaring that it would ban certain jokes about the virus.
Twitter said it would ban “description of treatments or protective measures which are not immediately harmful but are known to be ineffective, are not applicable to the COVID-19 context, or are being shared with the intent to mislead others, even if made in jest.”
Twitter also said it would ban a range of other posts that constitute “false or misleading” information or “denial of scientific facts” about certain aspects of the Chinese coronavirus.
Twitter announced that it is “broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”
Chinese propagandists on social media, colloquially known as the “50 Cent Army” or the “Wu Maos,” have been waging a propaganda campaign around the coronavirus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Last Friday, failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attracted praise from Chinese officials after she accused President Trump of “racist rhetoric” over the Chinese virus.
It is true. Justice always speak loudly. https://t.co/kZjcYccFPg
— Chinese Embassy in South Africa (@ChineseEmbSA) March 20, 2020
“Justice always speaks loudly,” said the Chinese ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian.
Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
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