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August 28, 2020 04:44 pm

How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic

In China, the messaging platform blocked thousands of keywords related to the virus, a new report reveals. From a report: When the novel coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country responded aggressively, placing tens of millions of people into strict lockdown. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was just as forceful in controlling how the health crisis was portrayed and discussed among its own people. Politically sensitive material, like references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, have long been forbidden on China's highly censored internet, but researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab say these efforts reached a new level during the pandemic. "The blunt range of censored content goes beyond what we expected, including general health information such as the fact [that] the virus spreads from human contact," says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the associate director of Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on technology and human rights. Citizen Lab's latest report, published earlier this week, finds that between January and May this year, more than 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users in the country. Many of the censored terms referenced events and organizations in the United States. Unlike in the US, internet platforms in China are responsible for carrying out the government's censorship orders and can be held liable for what their users post. Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not comment in time for publication. WeChat blocks content via a remote server, meaning it's not possible for research groups like Citizen Lab to study censorship on the app by looking at its code. "We can send messages through the server and see if they are received or not, but we can't see inside of it, so the exact censorship rules are a bit of a mystery," Crete-Nishihata says.

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