eyeballs

The issue of my newsletter that I posted today is concerned largely with the Hong Kong protests, but let me add a note to that. In that post I quote Maciej Cegłowski, who has been in Hong Kong participating in the protests, and he recently tweeted:

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags pic.twitter.com/6Wb0Km6GOb

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 17, 2019

So let’s keep this in mind for future reference, okay? If you are a tyrannical government, or you work for such a government, and you want to get your lies about what’s happening in your country before as many eyeballs as possible, Twitter is ready and eager to sell you access to those eyeballs.