If the tweet is genuine, then it makes the government (at least local) look like they are trying to cover something up and makes Deng Yujiao's side of the story even more believable.

You know what would be really fun? the Chinese netizens should organize a tour of say 3000 people to visit Badong county, just an ordinary tour group to troll around that place.

Here's another reminder to my journalist friends in China: don't visit rural villages without adequate weapons and your own posse of kung-fu trained bodyguards (BYOB!).
This incident and the recent one involving the foreign Financial Times reporter in Mianzhu just proves my point.
If I was a reporter interviewing tofu construction (豆腐渣工程) victim's parents or other high profile injustices in the countryside then you can bet I'm packing pepper spray as well as multiple digital cameras and cellphones.
Let's see what those thugs do when I show up with a microphone in one hand and a groovy looking curved Tibetan knife in the other!

@Spelunker

The thing about going to rural regions is, you can be a journalist with a definitive purpose, or just an ordinary traveler, in either case, you need equip some defense gears, and in either case, people there see you as an ATM without a password pad.

@Spelunker:

Additionally, because the journalist is the outsider, regardless of thinking himself/herself the knight-on-a-white-stallion out to save the poor downtrodden, the thugs of a local area can and will whip up the frenzy of a critical impact amount of locals to suddenly get very ugly and nasty against "that person that wants to make our little utopia look bad to the outside world and higher up CCP types".

I beg to differ with LoveChinaLongTime; I strongly believe the 白马王子 journalist from the Financial Times (Mr. Jamil Anderlini) would have had a supportive crowd of locals if he had tactically interviewed the tofu construction （豆腐渣工程）victim's mother in the Mianzhu town square instead of near her residence. In the HBO documentary "China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province" you can see a large crowd of locals from Mianzhu marching on the road to Chengdu.
No thugs tried to stop such a large crowd in front of a foreign film crew, instead they were persuaded to board a bus to the county seat (big mistake) by guilty local officials.
(If Spelunker was with HBO that day I would have persuaded the Mianzhu marchers to avoid the bus and continue onward to Chengdu!)

Likewise I think there are enough locals sympathetic to Deng Yujiao that Wei Yi's interview could have been conducted successfully in an open town square rather than at the isolated grandmother's house.
China's journalists should take my advice and plan accordingly; enlisting trustworthy locals to gather at a central interview location while also ensuring there are enough video cameras to record any attempted thuggery.
Also, by arranging the interview in the town square (rather than out in the fields where their homes are) you can effectively prevent the thugs from being aware of your arrival.

Another alternative would be picking up the interviewee at the lcoal market and then driving to a safe isolated undisclosed location to conduct the interview, preferably in an adjacent county or the nearest big city.
(Chengdu, Wuhan, etc.)

According to the lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, two of the QQ groups that he joined had been suspended. Liu Xiaoyuan reckons that there is pressure on the service provider to curb online discussions about Deng Yujiao's case.

There is no such thing as a Chinese "journalist" or at least a free one.

It is no surprise that the journalists got beaten when they tried to pry open something that is not supposed to be revealed or admitted. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it, but if you want to speak it out, it will not be nice...