MCLC: sharing feel-good news about Tibet (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: sharing feel-good news about Tibet (1)
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Here's a follow-up to the story just posted.

Kirk 

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Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (7/22/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/twitter-acts-quickly-on-susp
ect-pro-china-accounts

Twitter Acts Quickly on Suspect Pro-China Accounts
By ANDREW JACOBS 

Talk about prompt customer service.

Just hours after The New York Times posted an article about bogus Twitter
accounts dedicated to spreading pro-China propaganda — and a Tibetan
advocacy group demanded that the company take action — Twitter appears to
have hit the kill switch on a score of the suspect accounts.

By late Monday night, the accounts of Tom Hugo, Felix James, Alayna Newark
and a number of other comely, if oddly named, supporters of China’s
contentious ethnic minority policies had been suspended.

About 100 of the accounts that the organization Free Tibet had identified
as a sham shared a few common traits: Their creators “borrowed”
photographs of models, actors or American high school students from the
Internet and then combined them with vaguely Anglo-Saxon-sounding names.

With few exceptions, the accounts tweeted only content from propaganda
websites devoted to positive stories about Tibet and Xinjiang, the region
in China’s far west whose native inhabitants, the Uighurs, are, like the
Tibetans, increasingly unhappy with Beijing’s governance. The sites, such
as Show China <http://en.showchina.org/>, publish in a number of foreign
languages, although English appears to be their strong suit.

Alistair Currie, the media manager for Free Tibet, said the organization
was pleased that Twitter had acted so quickly. But he said that a number
of dodgy accounts had survived, including that of Ken Peters
<https://twitter.com/Kenpeters91>, a vehement critic of the Dalai Lama who
enjoys more than 2,000 followers, and Shelley John
<https://twitter.com/shelleyjohn2>, who has a soft spot for traditional
Tibetan hair braiding but appears to have fewer than 20 followers.

Mr. Currie said the organization, which is based in London, was still
working to identify other fake accounts and would press Twitter to delete
them.

“It looks like they took down the obvious ones that used two first names,
but the bigger question is what action Twitter is going to take to prevent
this from happening in the future,” Mr. Currie said in a telephone
interview.

Although the unidentified pro-Beijing propagandists who created the
accounts have taken a hit, it would seem that all is not lost for them. It
turns out that Tom Hugo and his attractive friends were not
one-dimensional characters. In fact, Mr. Hugo and several other of the
vanished Twitter users also maintain YouTube channels (see here
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvxReEGC9CltcvcOnx5e68A> and here
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdS64zpfZbwTphNSLrNsJiw>), which, at the
moment, are still up and running.