Twitter has been allowing promoted tweets—essentially targeted ads— to be placed by China's state media, attacking pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and blaming those campaigners for the escalating violence and civil unrest. The use of social media to peddle political and electoral interference is not new—it is a major theme of the backlash against social media. Usually, though, it is more subtle and cleverly orchestrated than the blunt promoted tweets that China's state media has been paying Twitter to publish.
