Many of CCTVNews’s facebook status posts include screen snapshots of popular twitter feeds, use references to conversation on Twitter. But they rarely linked to longer, business-like articles. I used google to find the more legitimate-looking, ‘official’ versions of the CCTVNews articles on the official CCTV-English website, so they do exist. My guess is that they are aimed at a different audience.
I can think of two possible reasons: 1) twitter and texting have been prolific in China because of sudden industrialization around 1980. The community that these posts reach would include Chinese living abroad, who are fluent in ‘new media literacy’.
2) (Though I do not have evidence to support this), I personally suspect that the use of twitter in news might trace to 2008. AiWeiWei, an artist, asked Chinese citizens to report the names of deceased family and friends from the 2008 Sichuan Earthqquake through twitter. It was a way of confronting or challenging the ‘official’ count of the dead.
*revised for more specificity