Hong Kong protest reports: Refinitiv created filter to keep Reuters stories about unrest from mainland Chinese customers

As anti-government demonstrations engulfed Hong Kong in August, a sensitive story was broken by Reuters news agency: Beijing had rejected a secret proposal by Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to meet several of the protesters’ demands in an effort to defuse the unrest.

The story buttressed a main claim of the protesters, that Beijing was intervening heavily in the city’s affairs. A state-run newspaper denounced the story as “fake” and “shameful.” The article was quickly made inaccessible to readers in mainland China.

It was not the Chinese government that blocked the story. The article was removed by Refinitiv, the financial information provider that distributes Reuters news to investors around the world on Eikon, a trading and analytics platform. The article was one of a growing number of stories that Refinitiv – which until last year was owned by Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters – has censored in mainland China under pressure from the central government.

Since August, Refinitiv has blocked more than 200 stories about the Hong Kong protests plus numerous other Reuters articles that could cast Beijing in an unfavourable light. Internal Refinitiv documents showed that over the summer, the company installed an automated filtering system to help with the censorship. The system included the creation of a code to attach to some China stories, called “restricted news”.

As a result, Refinitiv’s customers in China have been denied access to coverage of one of the biggest news events of the year, including two Reuters reports on downgrades of Hong Kong by credit-rating agencies. Nearly 100 other news providers available on Eikon in China have also been affected by the filtering.