A Hong Kong court found two former editors of the now-defunct Stand News guilty of “sedition” on Thursday for their coverage of the pro-democracy uprising in 2019.
It was the first time journalists had been found guilty of sedition in Hong Kong since China took control of the island in 1997.
Stand News was a non-profit website founded in 2014, the year of the “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong. When the much larger pro-democracy protests of 2019 broke out, the website’s popularity exploded.
At its peak in 2019, Stand News reported more than 20 million page views per month. Fresh donations poured in, and the formerly shoestring website suddenly had more than 60 employees, but, then, the Chinese communist puppet government in Hong Kong decided to crush the pro-democracy movement and shut down its media organs.
Apple Daily, the enormously popular pro-democracy paper…
