Although protests in China have now successfully convinced government officials to loosen enforced COVID-19 restrictions, anybody expressing their dissent in person or online has had to do so while navigating their country's notoriously strict censors.
"I think that what really precipitated this right now is [that] the COVID restrictions have just been soul crushing for people," said Graham Webster, a research scholar at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and an editor for their DigiChina Project.
One method of getting around social media censors is by communicating with people outside of the country, sending them videos, photos, and other materials that would otherwise be wiped from Chinese platforms. Once those materials are posted to a non-censored platform like Twitter, users in China would then be able to re-import and reshare them, using oblique language and rotating, editing or flipping the videos to bypass filters.
Another tactic has removed the need for words entirely, transforming a blank sheet of office paper into a"People will post pictures of those, or even blog posts that just have these phrases, these sort of empty phrases repeated over and over again. There was one that was going around that said over and over again: 'good, good, good, yes, yes, yes, right, right, right'," Webster said.
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