Since 2008, 12 March has marked the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, drawing awareness to the means of digital repression governments have relied on around the world to silence and censor freedom of expression online. In such environments, many governments combine the technical tools of censorship with the persecution of online users, few more adeptly than China.
China employs one of the most sophisticated censorship regimes in the world, backed up by targeted intimidation, harassment, and arbitrary imprisonment when the censors fail to prevent the dissemination of information Beijing does not like. Now it has begun to persecute the followers of exiled Chinese social media influencers, whose overseas accounts protect them from the blockages that befall Chinese platforms inside the Great Firewall.
Social media and messaging platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, YouTube, Signal, and Telegram, along with thousands of news and other websites, are inaccessible in China without a VPN, which are all but illegal. The fact that Chinese platforms like Weibo, which is similar to Twitter, or super apps like Weixin, known in English as WeChat, face constant censorship for content and accounts that run afoul of Party directives is well-documented, and understandably part of the reason why foreign platforms are so popular.
Amid all this censorship, there is an Orwellian irony in the fact China seeks a near-total ban on all foreign social media platforms at home, while relying on these same platforms to push coordinated propaganda to foreign audiences.
In February, a major leak at I-Soon, a Chinese private contractor, revealed major hacking contracts targeting foreign social media accounts, along with regional governments.
With the roll back of trust and safety and Chinese language teams at some leading social media platforms, China-linked foreign information manipulation and intimidation has spiked in recent years.
Still, despite the risks, countless Chinese citizens at home bravely maintain foreign social media accounts to share and receive valuable information with domestic and foreign audiences outside of State controls, and to engage with voices in the diaspora. Recently, unable to censor or intimidate into silence exiled influencers, Beijing has been waging a war of harassment against their followers inside the country, relying on old-fashioned thuggery to accomplish its end goals of cyber censorship.
This not only limits access to these accounts for domestic Chinese audiences but silences would-be whistleblowers from sharing information, or decreases the lively conversations taking place within the comments — yes, after filtering out the trolls. This risks a real blow to Chinese language expression and access to information that could go well beyond domestic audiences, as it is indeed part of Beijing’s tactics of globalising cyber censorship.
Dissident influencers
In the last months of 2022 Chinese censors were furiously scrubbing the internet for references of a high-profile protest in Beijing, where the message of a lone demonstrator’s banner was going viral: ‘We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves.’ They were busy going after protesters for holding up blank pieces of paper and demanding an end to the country’s zero-Covid policies. They were blocking content on Weibo, infiltrating Telegram, and challenging Apple to restrict AirDrop to prevent the dissemination of protest messaging — in January 2024, a Chinese company claimed to have cracked encryption on Apple AirDrop.
Throughout this cat and mouse with domestic censors through late 2022 and last year, activists across the country were increasingly reaching across the Firewall to share videos, photos, and other content, often to exiled influencers who could disseminate the information outside of domestic censors’ reach. Two accounts that rose to prominence last year were those of a former Chinese state-media broadcaster Wang Zhi’an, who posts on X as @wangzhian8848, and artist Li Ying, who posts as @whyyoutouzhele or 李老师不是你老师, meaning ‘Teacher Li is not your teacher’, which has earned him the pseudonym of Teacher Li.
Teacher Li, no stranger to Chinese censorship, and living in Italy since 2015, used to be active on Weibo, since around 2021 people would reach out asking him to post sensitive content on their behalf. His Weibo account was shut down some 50 times for crossing the line into social issues, until he was finally purged from the Chinese platform. In April 2022 he switched to X. Through late 2022, he gained some 600,000 followers as he became a clearinghouse for information about protests raging at a Foxconn factory and others across China.
Wang Zhi’an, formerly a broadcaster with China’s state-media outlet CCTV (China Central Television), in protest of the ever-increasing censorship under Xi Jinping and the persecution he faced as a critical voice in an otherwise propagandising industry, fled China for Japan in 2020. In exile, Wang has taken to foreign social media to promote investigations into corruption and other matters he could no longer cover living in the country.
China’s censors, unable to totally stamp out access to foreign social media platforms domestically or silence influential accounts abroad, are now going after their followers back home.
From censorship to intimidation
On 25 February this year, Teacher Li and Wang Zhi’an revealed in separate posts that the Ministry of Public Security was investigating the identities of their combined over 2.5 million followers, and anyone who had responded in their comments. Those who were identified were being invited for tea, a euphemism in China for being summoned and interrogated.
This is all the more alarming in light of the I-Soon leak, publicised only days earlier, which revealed that the company offered its Chinese security sector clients tools that could break into individual accounts on foreign platforms, including X, giving the government access to phone numbers and private messages.
In his post, Teacher Li cautioned his followers to unfollow him for their safety, and recommended a number of ways to secure their accounts. Since the post on 25 February, Teacher Li has gone from over 1.6 million followers to 1.4 million.
Wang also posted to his roughly 1 million followers that the police were investigating him on X and YouTube, where he has around 1.2 million followers. He advised those based in China to unfollow or unsubscribe for their safety, or at least to consider more passive participation through reading content but not speaking: self-censorship as protection.
These are some of the more high-profile, international voices on Chinese-language social media, supporting freedom of expression and access to information in an already incredibly controlled digital ecosystem. The intimidation of their followers, in this way, points to an escalation in police tactics to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing foreign social media platforms. It sends a new wave of silence through the community.
In this environment, foreign platforms must do more to identify and mitigate the risks to their users.
Responding to the threat
On 11 March 2024, the United States and European Union released a Joint Guidance for Online Platforms on Protecting Human Defenders Online. This is a welcome blueprint for how platforms could better ensure freedom of expression and the safety of Chinese users. Its 10 points include better risk identification and mitigation measures, resources for HRD protection, call for greater capacity in local contexts, access to remedy, and transparency, among others.
Transparency is critical, for example, in labelling inauthentic and abusive accounts. Trust and safety teams with Chinese language and political sensitivities are necessary to confront the onslaught of China-linked information manipulation and harassment taking place.
Transparency must also be balanced with privacy. Chinese users of foreign social media platforms must be allowed anonymity – for their protection.
In his post, Teacher Li provided guidance to his followers on how to secure their accounts. This information should be disseminated by the platforms themselves. They need better policies, better toolkits and guidelines, and especially resources in Chinese language based on knowledge of local contexts and the tools of repression.
Platforms should consider their duty of care to individuals facing judicial harassment merely for using their services and whether more resources should be made available for protection funds.
Ultimately, China will continue to censor foreign social media platforms while utilising them for propagandising and harassment abroad. Chinese citizens, meanwhile, will continue to risk persecution to access foreign platforms free of domestic censorship.
The question incumbent upon global social media platforms this World Day Against Cyber Censorship is whether they are more concerned with the free expression and safety of individual users, or the governments who actively censor them.