Quote: Twitter has been distributing sponsored posts from Chinese state media criticizing the Hong Kong protests, as spotted by the account of Pinboard, a social-media bookmarking site run by the entrepreneur and developer Maciej Ceglowski.

The posts were from China's state-run Xinhua news agency. "Two months on, the escalating violence in Hong Kong has taken a heavy toll on the social order," one tweet reads, adding that "all walks of life in Hong Kong called for a brake to be put on the blatant violence and for order to be restored."

A second sponsored tweet portrayed the public sentiment in Hong Kong as at odds with the protests, saying that "Hong Kong citizens call for stopping violence, ending chaos and restoring order in the city," while another pushed a video that described Hong Kong's economy as deteriorating, though it did not explicitly link this to the protests.

The Hong Kong protests, now in their 11th week, were sparked by a now-shelved bill that would have allowed citizens to be extradited to and tried in mainland China, where they would not be privy to the civil-rights protections preserved in Hong Kong.

Organizers said that as many as 1.7 million people were out in force in a peaceful protest on Sunday, according to CNN.

There have been eruptions of violence in the protests, with police officers spraying tear gas, beating protesters, and firing beanbags.

Twitter is banned in mainland China, blocked by the country's "Great Firewall" along with Facebook, Google, and numerous other US tech companies.

Ceglowski, who attended the protests, described the promoted tweets from the Chinese outlet as "lies."

"I just came home from a completely peaceful march where possibly a million Hong Kong residents came out, with no police in sight, to call for basic democratic rights," he wrote. "What greets me is straight up lies from Xinhua about 'bands of thugs', courtesy of Twitter advertising."

It's not clear how long the sponsored posts have been running, or exactly where in the world they've been distributed using Twitter's marketing tools.

Twitter was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

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Twitter and facebook will openly admit that their platforms are used to meddle in our elections.

And there's no way they will be able to proactively determine what is authentic, and what is foreign propaganda. They can eventually figure it out, but by that time the message has already gotten out.

So we're at a point where AMERICAN CITIZENS are barred from participating in our election process via the new online public square, but foreign governments are given a platform for their propaganda. Twitter and facebook are literally Russian and Chinese assets.

It's so f'ed up, and any criticism is disregarded as a "baseless conspiracy theory".