Word of anti-lockdown protests in China spread on domestic social media for a short period last weekend, thanks to a rare pause in the cat-and-mouse game that goes on between millions of Chinese internet users and the country’s huge censorship machine.
But images of protests began to spread on WeChat, a ubiquitous Chinese social networking platform used by over 1 billion, in theNov. 24 in the northwestern city of Urumqi. Many suspected that lockdown measures prevented residents from escaping the flames, something the government denies.
In 2020, the death from COVID-19 of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was arrested for spreading rumors following an attempt to alert others about a “SARS-like” virus, sparked widespread outrage and an outpouring of anger against the Chinese censorship system. Users posted criticism for hours before censors moved to delete posts.As censors took down posts related to the fire, Chinese internet users often used humor and metaphor to spread critical messages.
Most content censorship is not done by the state, Jung said, but outsourced to content moderation operations at private social media platforms, who use a mix of human and AI. Some censored posts are not deleted, but may be made visible only to the author, or removed from search results. In some cases, posts with sensitive key phrases may be published after review.
But the system works well enough to stop many users from ever seeing them. When protests broke out across China over the weekend, Carmen Ou, who lives in Beijing, initially didn’t notice.“I tried looking at my feed on WeChat, but there was no mention of any protests,” she said. “If not for a VPN and access to Instagram, I might not have found out that such a monumental event had taken place.
Searching Twitter using the Chinese words for Shanghai or other Chinese cities reveals protest videos, but also also a near-constant flood of new posts showing racy photos of young women. Some researchers proposed that a state-backed campaign could be seeking to drown out news of the protests with “not safe for work” content.
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