SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter suspended a large number of Chinese dissident accounts just days before the most politically sensitive period of the year in China.<br /><br />The New York Times reports that June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.<br /><br />In China, Big Brother keeps the seal extra tight on 'that sensitive period in June,' which means several extra doses of censorship from the Great Firewall. <br /><br />So when the accounts of prominent and long-time critics of the Beijing government suddenly dropped off the face of Twitter, everyone assumed it was the Chinese censors.<br /><br />According to the New York Times, over a hundred users got the cut- from human rights lawyers, activists, and nationalists, to even college students.<br /><br />The reasoning made sense, since Beijing's internet po-po had been carrying out a campaign way before June 4 that targeted Chinese Twitter users, who often used VPNs to work around China's Twitter block. <br /><br />But as it turns out, it wasn't China- or so says Twitter. Supposedly, the purge was all part of routine Twitter efforts to "stop spam and inauthentic behavior." <br /><br />According to TechCrunch, the company claimed in a statement that Chinese authorities hadn't mass reported the accounts. Instead, it seemed Twitter was cleaning CCP bots and accidentally suspended a whole lotta anti-CCP accounts.<br /><br />That doesn't quite make sense, and people online think so too.<br /><br />Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the U.S. based publication "China Change" said in a tweet she thinks something else is going on, and speculated that the "routine process" may have been abused by someone on the payroll.
