Beijing is estimated to pay over a quarter of a million social media operatives, and the government posts up to half a billion self-serving messages annually. It also runs a “Great Firewall” of censorship and restrictions, and here Yuan Ren explains what it feels like to be caught on the wrong side of the fence. Below, we highlight other government efforts—for good, or more often for ill—to get a grip on the web.
I reply to my friend: “What are you talking about?” We are on WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform, a kind of Facebook- Whats-App hybrid. A message I had received referred to “the above photo.” There was no photo.
My friend responds with a screenshot from his phone—and there it is, the missing picture. It had seemingly been plucked out, somewhere en route. But there was no error message. This is the new age of Chinese online censorship: automated and sneaky.