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users, immersed in a race against network censorship

users, immersed in a race against network censorship

By 4 Mins Read

A video showing only a blank piece of paper with the phrase “Silence here speaks louder, those who understand it know it” doesn’t seem very threatening… unless it’s written in Chinese characters and you understand that it refers to the new wave of online censorship unleashed in the Asian giant as a consequence of the growing protests against the anti-COVID measures of the communist regime.

The aforementioned video, of course, was quickly removed by government censors who closely monitor the country’s main online communication platform, WeChat. They are also deleting (on that and other platforms, such as Weibo) thousands of messages with texts even more innocuous than the previous one, such as “Well, well, well, well” or “Good, good, good”.

Innocent phrases like “I saw it” are also being censored: they are understood as references to having had time to view content before it was removed by censors

Context is everything, and in China, both users and censors know that it is the latest trend set up to express discontent in a sarcastic way: a method that automated keyword redaction systems could not detect at first. But by now everyone knows that saying “good” many times is as subversive as writing “Democracy, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Uighurs, Falung Gong“.

Yet China has been subjected to the stifling arbitrariness of anti-COVID measures for years now, so what has prompted this sudden wave of critical messages… and even (few, but unexpected) street protests?

Of "Disney" a "change the law": These are the terms that China blocks on its Weibo social network

Fundamentally, two facts:

  • The Soccer World Cup in Qatar: Seeing crowds of fans from other countries living a normal life on television, all crowded together, without even wearing masks, has inflamed many Chinese citizens who are still subjected to extraordinary measures, including (depending on the city or neighborhood) long confinement in their homes. The reaction has been so negative that Chinese TV has begun to replace the shots of spectators in the field that we can see in the rest of the world by shots of players and the bench, as can be seen here:
  • A video spread on social networks: Ten dead in a fire that broke out on Thursday night in an apartment block in Urumqi, capital of the western region of Xinjiang, a city that has been under lockdown for more than three months, spread rapidly on networks, and users began to question whether anti-COVID controls might have hampered rescue efforts. Other videos, showing firefighters spraying water from too far away from the building because ‘pandemic barriers’ prevented them from getting closer, seem to support that view.
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A game of cat and mouse

Thus, on Weibo (Chinese Twitter), any search for ‘Wuluqui street’ now only offers results from October 18 and days before. The reason? It was there that the people of Urumqui gathered to protest on Saturday after the video of the fire was released.

China banned the letter ene from the internet to avoid criticism of its president's plan to perpetuate himself in power

In China, censors and users star today a game of cat and mouse: every time an apparently innocuous fact becomes a symbol of discontent, is censored and citizens have to start looking for/creating a new symbol. That anti-government graffiti appears on a stairway to the symbolic Shanghai University, and the censors begin to censor photos and references to the university? Well, users start to spread schematic versions of the photo:

Most significantly, where the Chinese government does not have direct control over censorship, as is the case with Twitter, government bots have opted for the opposite strategy: flooding certain Mandarin searches about certain cities with content. protests. And by ‘content’ we mean massive spam about prostitution, pornography and gambling, which is being used to make tweets critical of the government invisible:

Via | Bloomberg

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