Twitter Fact-Checks China Spokesman’s Tweets About Virus Origins
- Fact check applied to March tweets from China’s Zhao Lijian
- Notification similar to what Twitter used on President Trump
Zhao Lijian
Photographer: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
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Twitter has applied a fact check tag to at least two posts by China Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian, both of which advanced questions about whether the Covid-19 virus began in the U.S. rather than China.
The tags, at the base of the tweets originally posted in March, are marked with an exclamation point inside a circle and follow with text that reads “Get the facts about COVID-19”. Clicking the link takes a user to tweets about the virus origin, which emphasize that the virus appears to have originated in animals in China, rather than a virus laboratory in Wuhan, China.