How WeChat censored the coronavirus pandemic

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Louise Matsakis

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When the new coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country reacted aggressively, hitting tens of millions of others in a strict blockade. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was equally forceful in controlling how the fitness crisis was described and discussed among its own people.

Politically sensitive documents, such as references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, have long been banned on China’s highly censored Internet, but scholars of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say those efforts reached a new point with the pandemic. “The blunt diversity of censored content goes beyond what we expected, adding general fitness data such as the fact that the virus spreads through human contact,” says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, associate director of Citizen Lab, a generation- and human rights-focused research organization.

Citizen Lab’s most recent report, released earlier this week, shows that more than 2,000 pandemic-like keywords were removed between January and May this year. Many censored terms refer to occasions and organizations in the United States.

Unlike the United States, Internet platforms in China are guilty of executing government censorship orders and can be found guilty for what their users post. Tencent, owner of WeChat, did not comment in time for the post. WeChat blocks content through a remote server, which means it’s not imaginable for search teams like Citizen Lab to examine app censorship by reviewing their code. “We can send messages through the server and see if they win or not, but we can’t see them inside, so the precise censorship regulations are a little mysterious,” says Crete-Nishihata.

For its most recent report, Citizen Lab sent a text copied from Chinese press articles to an organization chat it created on WeChat with 3 fake accounts, one registered on a phone number in mainland China and two registered in Canadian phone numbers. They used media articles, adding some founded in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as publications controlled by the Chinese state. If a message was blocked, the researchers would perform additional tests to identify the words that triggered censorship. Some of the blocked messages were originally posted through Chinese state media. In other words, although a user or a topic can be freely discussed in the government-controlled press, it is still prohibited on WeChat.

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The Citizen Lab report shows how much the Chinese government has tried on the narrative from the beginning. While the citizens of Wuhan remained blocked, WeChat blocked prayers about Li Wenliang, a local doctor who warned his colleagues about a new infectious disease before it was revealed through the government, and which has become a popular hero of free speech after his death by Covid. -19. February. WeChat also prevented its users from discussing an advertisement through Chinese officials that they had informed the U.S. government. Of the pandemic for the first time on January 3, about 3 weeks before saying anything to its own citizens. And he censored mentions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When the organization was related to the word “coronavirus”.

In March, Covid-19 had a global pandemic and WeChat began blocking some mentions of foreign teams such as the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. He has also censored references to epidemics in other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia and the United Kingdom. Citizen Lab found that most foreign-related blocked words involved the United States, the subject of the third component of the report.

U.S.-China relations were already strained earlier this year and the pandemic has become a major flashpoint between the two countries. Last February, some U.S. officials began to put forward a conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was a biological weapon manufactured through the Chinese government. The false was also due to right-wing figures like Former Trump’s ex-treasurer Steve Bannon. WeChat temporarily blocked the mentions of “Bannon and Bio Lab” and other payment terms. In May, when U.S.-China relations fell to their lowest point in decades, an organization of Republican senators filed a bill that would change the name of the open-air street of the Chinese embassy in Washington as “Li Wenliang Square,” according to Wuhan’s doctor. WeChat temporarily censored a number of key terms due to legislation.

“This censorship shows the continued politicization of the pandemic and the importance of objective, open and effective public aptitude communications,” says Crete-Nishihata. WeChat is not the only platform the Chinese government has included in its efforts. In a previous report published in March, Citizen Lab tested pandemic-like blocked keywords on China’s YY live streaming platform. Unlike WeChat, YY performs client-side censorship, that is, in the application’s own code. Through the app’s retroengineering, Citizen Lab was able to extract a list of censored keywords, adding “Wuhan’s Unknown Pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”, any of which was blocked in late December.

Researchers found that there is little similarity between keywords blocked through YY and those we do WeChat. This is not unusual: “Limited cross-platform censorship overlap in China is one of the consistent maximum effects we’ve noticed in studies in this domain for more than a decade,” says Crete-Nishihata.

This indicates that there is no centralized list of keywords that each and every online application and page has to block in China, says Crete-Nishihata. The formula isn’t that simple. Corporations that make up the country’s complex Internet eco-formula would possibly be indebted to other government authorities, or possibly have some freedom to interpret the same regulations in other ways. What is transparent is that since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, China has actively sought the narrative within its borders by employing the virtual equipment at its disposal.

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