Posts asking others not to be intimidated by the Chinese government are among the multitude of posts censored through one of the country’s largest social media platforms.
Sky News has been tracking deleted Weibo posts since the largest nationwide protests erupted in decades in late November.
Weibo claims on its platform that content is monitored and can be removed.
It’s not imaginable to know the true extent of the number of deleted messages, but an online tool collects and restores Weibo messages that have been blocked in an attempt to defy social media censorship.
“First they are afraid of speech, then of text, then of white papers, now even of a road sign. They are afraid of everything. So why are we afraid of them?”Read a banned article that resurfaced in freeweibo. Org.
The post was published after the third night of protests against China’s harsh zero COVID measures, and one of several messages calling on others to challenge authorities.
At the time, police clashed with protesters holding blank sheets of paper and officials got rid of a road sign pointing to one of Shanghai’s main collection sites, Urumqi Road.
In the wake of the protests, the country’s coronavirus laws began to relax in a policy of abrupt change.
Social media posts that citizens continue to push back at authorities were removed.
A boy from Zhejiang, a province near Shanghai, participated in online deguyds calling for the release of those arrested in the protests.
In an article published in early December, about a week after restrictions began to be eased, he wrote “let them go home” and shared another user’s message on Weibo that read: “It’s time to call for the protesters to be released!
“Thanks to those young people, we can leave our homes freely and we don’t want to be transported to hospitals in the cabin!”
The posts deleted in recent days come with the alleged party of a Beijing man confronted by police over his comments on social media.
“[My text] hit the authorities. They knocked on my door at night and arrested me for the crime of ‘fabricating facts and disturbing the social order’.
“They recorded my words over and over again and called my clerk and the checkpoint I discussed in the text. I’m not afraid because I didn’t lie.
“But horribly, once I left my house, they took my phone away so I couldn’t touch anymore. They even forced me to say my phone password. “
The anger of the Chinese public opposing the zero COVID policy likely appeared to erupt without warning, sparked by fears that restrictions contributed to the deaths of several people in a building fire.
However, the knowledge gathered through the Localization of Armed Conflicts
ACLED has registered protests related to COVID the pandemic. The data is from November 30 of this year but is not exhaustive. For example, it doesn’t seem to come with demonstrations that allegedly took place at 50 universities. It is limited by restrictions on data on Protests in China.
The first coronavirus-related protest in China recorded through ACLED took place on January 28, 2020, when many taxi drivers in Shanxi province protested the lack of activity due to the outbreak.
The first 4 months of the year saw similar protests, largely over issues with wages and access to coronavirus food closures. After that, COVID-19 protests usually disappeared until April 2022.
This outbreak in the spring of this year made headlines reporting that parts of China were already close to “civil unrest. “
From this moment on, we can see a series of protests in 2022.
Knowledge also allows us to see how geographically the protests have been, with protests all over the country.
Apparently, in reaction to those nationwide protests, December 1 saw the start of an immediate rollout of COVID restrictions reductions.
New considerations have emerged with this dramatic shift, with Chinese social media users sharing their fears about the upcoming coronavirus panic acquisition and commenting on their reports of fevers and sore throats online.
While some emerging COVID rates in China are the result of the policy change, WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan said infections have already risen. He said Thursday: “The disease was spreading intensely because I believe the control measures themselves were not preventing the disease. “
Manya Koetse, founder of tracking Weibo whatsonweibo. com, told Sky News: “There are a lot of mixed emotions among social media users.
“China goes from one extreme to the other, with some jokes that it’s no longer 0 COVID positive [nobody has the virus] but 0 negative COVID [everyone gets it]. “
Koetse says he has noticed social media users in small towns like Baoding and Dazhou that entire families now have fevers and that local services have limited resources, causing an overflow of local clinics.
But he has also noticed conversations on social media in primary cities like Beijing and Wuhan wondering if other people go to the hospital even if their symptoms are mild.
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