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How pandas help Chinese social media users fight state censorship

At the very beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Chinese government in every way concealed the true picture of what happened, which caused sharp criticism from users of Chinese social networks. The authorities responded immediately: numerous “critical” terms came under official censorship.

So, in January, users of the Weibo social platform began to complain that the words “Wuhan” and “Hubei” (the area of ​​the epicenter of the outbreak) had severe restrictions on the frequency of their use. Only for a small part of users were posts containing these words accessible, and criticism of the authorities was completely removed from them.

As a recent report by the Citizen Lab research group showed, on another popular social media platform WeChat, many phrases like “Xi Jinping goes to Wuhan” and “Wuhan + crisis + Beijing” also got blacklisted.

Faced with such tough opposition, users of social networks began to “encrypt” forbidden terms. For example, the words “Wuhan” and “Hubei” were designated “wh” and “hb”.

Against the background of increased censorship in an epidemic, more and more restrictions are daily imposed on the network language, which encourages regular social networks to look for alternative options. So, the Chinese name of the government has already turned into “zf”, the Chinese police into “jc”, and one of the country’s symbols – the panda – means, no less, the Bureau of National security.

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