“These materials may have been obtained through hacking,” reads the disclaimer affixed to a tweet linking to a story from an independent news outlet, The Grayzone. Twitter’s labeling of a Grayzone story that reflected badly on Britain shows the double standards at play.
Earlier this week, journalist Max Blumenthal published a series of leaked documents from the British Foreign Office on his news website the Grayzone, revealing that the BBC and the Reuters Foundation had participated in a covert program targeting Russia and its neighbors, seeking to push political change within the country.
Shunned by the mainstream media, the Grayzone report was subsequently targeted by Twitter, with each link being tagged with a warning stating: “These materials may have been obtained through hacking.”
Furthermore, readers discovered that an extra step was added when trying to retweet posts linking to The Grayzone’s story: A pop-up appeared reiterating the warning label and asking users to “help keep Twitter a place for reliable info.”
This appears to be the first instance of Twitter using this particular warning label on an English-language outlet.
Forsided, 25.02.2021