Is the latest Covid-19 surge is being censored more frequently on popular platforms in China? Videos uploaded to WeChat, revealing conditions are being removed. Chinese netizens are getting tired of the censorship but posts complaining about censorship are being removed as well.
Chinese citizens are struggling since the recent lockdown. Residents remain in their homes, many with little food and access to healthcare other than treatment for Covid-19 related illness. People are frustrated and taking this to social media after promises that there wasn’t going to be another lockdown.
A six-minute video recently uploaded to WeChat, “Voices of April”, documents what is happening in Shanghai’s lockdown. The video made by a Shanghai resident immediately got taken down.
Netizens are speaking out against the censorship. “What exactly is causing the nationwide censorship of that video?” Why do they have to scrub such a mild and objective video from the internet? Who gave them the right to scrub such a mild and objective video from the internet?” author Léi Sīlín 雷斯林 writes. His post and account were later removed as well.
“Since the outbreak began in Shanghai, so many people have spoken out in the past month. However, the majority of these voices were quickly wiped off the Chinese internet and people have grown numb to the situation as time went by, but some things shouldn’t have happened and should not be forgotten.”-Cary, creator of the video
Wang Sicong, a Weibo influencer with 40 million followers, had his account removed after publicly questioning the testing protocol in Shanghai and whether traditional Chinese medicine (Lianhua Qingwen) was effective for COVID-19. The notice on the platform stated that his account was removed because of a “violation of related laws and regulations”. Sicong has previously refrained from posting his opinions on social media because of censorship, but he finally decided to speak out after the lockdown in Shanghai. He posted on WeChat that he plans to boycott mandatory Covid-19 testing because it’s a “test of people’s submissiveness”. China continues to drastically censor posts regarding Covid-19 that may be “harmful”.
Chinese media is praising their ”large makeshift hospitals to house patients or their close contacts”, but two Shanghai residents thought differently. In a recent podcast episode, they discussed conditions during their recent stay there. They described seeing older/disabled patients struggling, begging to be sent to a “real hospital”. This was censored two days later, but it still had been viewed over 10 million times.
Because of the recent influx of negative remarks about Covid-19, censors are “ramping up” efforts to remove “harmful” content. Social media platforms have started to display user locations from their IP addresses in order to prevent the spread of “rumors”.
Despite posts being censored on social media, users are finding ways around it such as using filters, and turning the post upside down. Some netizens are going as far as inserting content into games to avoid censorship. Hashtags and phrases such as “The Voices of Shanghai” are being removed as well. “The scale of the censorship required to silence dissent is too large this time” says Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley.
