China shuts down WeChat social media account claiming ‘US making dead bodies into hamburgers’
- China has shut a virulent anti-US WeChat account for spreading fake news and stoking xenophobia, as Beijing moves to rein in misinformation on social media
- Closure comes as Cyberspace Administration of China starts new campaign to clean up misinformation and conspiracy theories on Chinese internet
China has shut down a popular social media account for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories, as Beijing moves to curb misinformation and online hate speech in an attempt to tone down an ongoing war of words with the United States.
Nationalist groups and opportunistic businesses have latched onto the souring ties, exploiting social media to spread lies and push anti-US messages, experts said.
“The US has been processing dead bodies from Covid-19 diseases into hamburgers,” was one of the last postings on Zhidao Xuegong – literally the Scholar Forum for Ultimate Truth – which had millions of followers on China’s Facebook-like social media platform WeChat before it was shut down on Sunday.
The popular account garnered more than 1.7 million page views for 17 published articles in April, according to Xigua Data, a firm tracking traffic on Chinese social media accounts.
In an article published earlier this month entitled “Nearly Dead: the Sinking of the US”, the author Mr. Cloud claimed that Covid-19 may have already killed one million people in the US and the dead bodies “were very likely of being processed into frozen meat, fake beef or pork, or processed into cooked meat as hamburgers and hot dogs”.
“Cannibalism has existed in the US before … and only a few dozen years ago, Americans ate blacks, Indians and Chinese,” the author continued.