, its local authorities are splurging on global advertising on the site, helping make the country the platform’s fastest-growing overseas ad market and one of its largest non-U.S. revenue sources.
Four sources told Reuters operations in China became a source of internal clashes between teams keen to maximise the sales opportunity and others concerned at the optics of doing business with state-affiliated entities at a time of growing tension between Beijing and Washington. Zatko said during the hearing the agent was alleged to be from China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s main espionage agency.
Gaming, e-commerce, and tech firms in China are also key Twitter customers, according to two sources. Twitter’s sales of overseas ads to Chinese clients are estimated to be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars a year”, the people said, the majority coming from these companies.Twitter declined to comment on internal discussions and its sales performance in China. A spokesperson said the company has never hidden the fact that it does business with Chinese commercial entities.
The Chinese Communist Party’s top propaganda organ and the central government’s ministry of culture and tourism, both based in Beijing, did not respond to a request for comment.Twitter’s China region has seen an 800-fold improvement in revenue since 2014, the fastest-growing globally, according to the now-deleted LinkedIn bio of Twitter Greater China Managing Director Alan Lan. The bio was reviewed by Reuters late in August before it was taken down.