From stuck ticks to blue ticks: How Twitter learned to love China’s revenue

SINGAPORE/BEIJING – Even as China bans 1.4 billion citizens from Twitter, its local authorities are splurging on global advertising on the site, helping to make the country the fastest-growing foreign advertising market and one of of its largest non-U.S. sources of income.

A review of publicly available government tenders, budget documents, and promoted tweets from 2020 to 2022 shows that local authorities and Chinese Communist Party propaganda offices for cities, provinces, and even districts across the country have flocked to Twitter to buy ads.