Twitter retroactively added its new fact-check label to China’s foreign ministry spokesman’s tweets about the origin of the coronavirus.
The social media platform has made headlines in recent days for fact-checking a tweet from President Trump, which prompted a coming executive order on social media censorship, and recently slapped a similar alert on March 12 tweets from China Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian speculating that the U.S. military could be responsible for spreading the virus in China.
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“CDC was caught on the spot,” he wrote in one of the tweets with an accompanying video of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Robert Redfield testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee. “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
The tweet now features an exclamation point inside a circle with text that reads, “Get the facts about COVID-19.” The Twitter-provided link leads to a page that features a Reuters story, and the page is labeled “WHO says evidence suggests coronavirus originated in animals and was not produced in a lab.”
Zhao’s tweets “contain potentially misleading content” about the coronavirus and have been labeled “to provide additional context to the public. These actions are in line with the approach we shared earlier this month,” a spokesperson for Twitter told Bloomberg on Thursday.
