Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules. Excerpt:
Cui Yongyuan may not be a household name in the West, but the former state media television host has almost 20 million social media followers in China, or about double those tracking the Twitter account of CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the US.
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.
