World
Chinese activists, scribes jumping firewall to use Twitter
Washington: The booking of the micro-blogging site Twitter in China has not deterred people from the influential quarters to jump the firewall and other content restrictions and use the platform to reach out to the world, researchers from Harvard University report.
Offering a rare look at the activity of Chinese internet users on Twitter that is largely unregulated by the state and only reachable through the use of tools that circumvent state-mandated internet filters, the report found that Chinese internet users – activists, journalists and others – are actively circumventing content restrictions.
“In this paper, we map and analyse the structure and content found on Twitter centered around users in mainland China,” said the team of Sonya Yan Song, Robert Faris and John Kelly from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
They identified 36 clusters that focus primarily on three areas: politics, technology and entertainment.
From one perspective, the discourse in the politically engaged portions of Chinese Twitter suggests that Twitter serves an alternative public sphere.
The political group is formed of journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and scholars who are free to discuss topics typically not permitted in China, such as the Tiananmen Square protests, Tibetan and Uyghur issues, political scandals and pollution.
“Yet, China’s internet repression is clearly succeeding. Chinese Twitter falls well short of supporting a broadly accessible networked public sphere,” the authors pointed out.
The proportion of the Chinese populace with direct access to the debates, communities, and shared resources on Twitter is relatively small, and the avenues by which such discourse might find its way into mainstream political discussion are severely constrained.
“The firewall between Twitter and the much larger social media platforms in China remains a formidable barrier,” they noted.
“But for internet users that reside in mainland China, Twitter offers access to news from around the world and a wealth of ideas and perspectives that might otherwise be unavailable there, as well as a platform for building online communities that is not under direct control of the government,” they emphasised.
Based on a mixed-methods approach, combining social network analysis and a qualitative review of the content and activity of Chinese Twitter, the team was able to map and provide detailed accounts of the topically based clusters that form among these networks.
“Twitter is used by residents of mainland China to follow popular accounts that are not found on Sina Weibo or other Chinese microblogging platforms; the focus of attention includes political, technological, and cultural topics,” the study pointed out.
The political crowd, who would face the highest risks for their online speech, appear to be the least likely to seek anonymity.
“Many of these advocates openly tweet under their real names and include their face in their profiles,” the study concluded.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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