Coronavirus pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules
- China’s heavily regulated social media platforms have been removing and banning references to the Covid-19 pandemic
- Censorship trackers say impeding the flow of information may have hampered the global response
Cui was one of the highest profile bloggers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, where he was known for his social commentary and whistle-blowing.
But last year his posting stopped and in May he found that posts containing his nickname “Xiaocui” had been blocked.
That same month his account on WeChat, China’s biggest social media platform with 1 billion active users worldwide, was suspended citing fraud, according to screen shots he posted on Twitter.
“My name is censored. Are you trying to force me to the other side?”, he wrote on Twitter on May 15, referring to him having to use Western social media.
Cui, who teaches at the Communication University of China in Beijing, has also written about the Covid-19 disease outbreak and may be the latest victim of China’s censors to join the ranks of the “digital migrants” – a term for those who have been driven on to foreign social media platforms.
A WeChat spokesperson declined to comment on the closing of user accounts and content censorship. Three emails to Weibo seeking comment were not answered and a phone call to the company was not picked up.
Cui did not respond to a message on Twitter asking for further information.
Fu King-wa, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s censorship was no longer just a local issue, because the Covid-19 pandemic showed the international consequences of blocking information about such threats.
“In China, that kind of restricted information can really have huge global implications,” said Fu, who has been running the Weiboscope project to track censorship on the platform since 2011.
“In an authoritarian state like China, public conversation on many critical issues is restricted, media outlets are state-controlled and dissidents and independent journalists are routinely silenced,” he said, adding that raising early warnings in such a system was particularly challenging.
Censorship not only curtailed the response of Chinese people to the outbreak, but it may have meant that the global media was slower to wake up to the crisis, according to a paper Fu published with his colleague Yuner Zhu in the Journal of Risk Research in April.
China has the world’s highest number of internet users at over 854 million in 2019 according to the country’s Cyberspace Administration.
However, its online world is confined within the so-called “Great Firewall”, and everything from criticism of the government to pornography is censored.
Technology companies that run China’s social media platforms employ thousands of content moderators as censors and develop algorithms to prevent anything sensitive from being published or to quickly remove it, while foreign websites and social media platforms such Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are blocked.
It is possible to circumvent the wall by using a virtual private network (VPN), a piece of software that masks the location a user is posting from, but their use is illegal without a licence and they are not legally available to Apple and Android users.
Those caught selling VPNs can be jailed. A man was given a three-year sentence by a Shanghai court in 2018.
The Weiboscope project turned its attention to the Covid-19 disease this year, sifting through over 1.2 million posts drawn from a bank of randomly selected users and high-profile accounts that contained at least one coronavirus-related keyword.
About 2,100 posts – or 1.7 per thousand – were censored between December and February 27, according to Fu’s data.
Although the number may not seem high, most social media posts are usually state media reports or entertainment content, creating a massive common denominator, he said.
Internet users were also adept at avoiding words that censors looked for, he said, which reduced the number of censored posts based on the keywords used in Weiboscope.
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The paper also said there had been spikes in censorship on Weibo when criticism of the central government arose.
About 19 posts per 1,000 were removed – almost 700 from 37,226 – when China’s Centres for Disease Control published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on January 29 that indicated officials knew of human-to-human transmission of Covid-19 earlier than admitted.
The authorities had previously claimed there was no evidence of human-to-human spread of the disease “so that’s why this was the top grievance”, Fu said. “There were a lot of people complaining and reacting to that paper.”
News of the coronavirus became public on December 30, 2019, after screenshots from doctors’ chat groups warning about an unknown respiratory illness spread online.
Li’s death on February 7 prompted another spike in censorship with three posts per 1,000 – 117 out of 40,232 – relating to the topic being censored that day.
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Again, Fu said, what seemed like a low number was explained by the huge amount of posts and the fact that many would not have been detected by Weiboscope because they did not mention Li’s name to avoid the censors.
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Research published in the journal Nature last month estimated that if strong intervention had been taken against Covid-19 in China a week earlier, cases could have been “dramatically reduced” by 66 per cent.
Acting three weeks earlier, at the start of January, would have reduced the number of cases by 95 per cent, according to the paper by scientists from China, the United States and Britain.
“Early warnings allow governments to take early action,” Fu said. “We find evidence that social media posts including early warnings to the public were censored especially in the early stage of the pandemic.”
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Lin Yi, a Wuhan native, was one online user who saw her Weibo account censored for posting information related to Covid-19.
In early January she relied on state media for information but that changed after Wuhan was placed into lockdown on January 23.
“We can see the official media gave conflicting accounts … The public really wants freedom of speech. Why? Because we want transparency in the information we receive. Transparency is critical to fighting the epidemic and saving our own lives,” she said.
After Lin reposted content on Li Wenliang, calling for freedom of speech and posts from others that sought help, her Weibo account was suspended.
“I found this extremely difficult to accept. I did not post any radical speech,” she said. “I’m beyond disappointed. I find the current censorship system very strict, to the point of perversion.”
WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, censored 516 keyword combinations directly related to Covid-19 between January 1 and February 15, according to Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research group.
Out of the almost 200 censored keyword combinations referencing China’s leaders and their handling of the outbreak, the majority included Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name, titles or nicknames.
References to Li Wenliang appeared in 19 censored keyword combinations, according to the Citizen Lab report.
In January, WeChat said it would suspend accounts temporarily or permanently that spread rumours on Covid-19 in accordance with a law that bans the spreading of false information relating to natural disasters, epidemics and other crises.
Many accounts accused of spreading rumours about Covid-19 were suspended in February.
At least 345 users posted on Weibo that their WeChat accounts had been suspended without reasonable cause.
Their complaints turned into a topic category that was viewed over 3 million times before it was removed.
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Such suppression of speech spurred a group of volunteers to start the campaign Escape WeChat, which encourages users to become “digital migrants” and move to foreign social media platforms.
Initially, the group planned to propose legislation to protect freedom of speech, a volunteer said, “but we later realised it wasn’t practical and too sensitive”.
“So we had the idea to encourage users to leave WeChat, so speaking out can be safer,” said the volunteer, who declined to provide a name for fear of retribution.
Escape WeChat published a manifesto in February to promote their campaign that said: “We need to make it clear that there is no social media inside the Great Firewall that can enable us to evade censorship, the removal of accounts and content, or even trouble with law enforcement.”
The organisers of the campaign encouraged users to move to Telegram, a messaging platform started in Russia, which is blocked in China. The Telegram channel they set up in February now has about 1,870 subscribers.
But efforts like these face increasing crackdowns from Chinese authorities.
Last month, a Telegram discussion group for Escape WeChat was shut down after several volunteers who helped to start the initiative were tracked down by public security agents.
“I used to joke we’re like Germany in 1933,” the volunteer said. “But everything is deteriorating so fast recently, I can’t laugh about this any more.”
