After the “Voices of April” video was blocked, users re-uploaded it in a way they hoped would bypass the censors’ detection. The video was posted upside down, the audio was linked to various images, and people posted fake movie posters with a QR code linking to the clip.
Hundreds also shared the video over the Interplanetary File System, a distributed, peer-to-peer Internet protocol, according to an investor and entrepreneur living in Xintiandi, an affluent suburb in central Shanghai, speaking anonymously to avoid being in the problems with the authorities. Files stored with IPFS are broken up and shared by many different machines, and communications are encrypted, so it is much more difficult for authorities to remove or block content.
Despite being overwhelmed at times, the censors have not given up on harrowing stories about the lockdown and anger directed at politicians or China’s zero-covid policy. While the Chinese government employs its own censors, the country’s social media companies also have teams of moderators who remove content that the Chinese Communist Party deems illegal. Companies like Weibo have a financial incentive to do this well. In December, Weibo was fined 3 million yuan ($470,000) for letting unspecified illegal content slip through his net.
The most damning reports, for example about people committing suicide, have been scrapped by the country’s internet censorship, says the Shanghai investor. He blames government officials in Shanghai for mismanaging the situation and believes a number of people in his neighborhood have died of starvation, although this has not been reported anywhere. “I’m amazed at how great the information asymmetry is,” he says. “Even friends in other cities in China were not aware of the actual situation in Shanghai,” he says.
Police have also contacted people who post critical content on international social media platforms, according to Ming Gao, who works in PR and lives in Shanghai’s central Jing’An district. When Gao saw some photos circulating on Chinese social media that were critical of his city’s Covid strategy, he said he wanted more people to see them. So on April 18, he posted the photos on twitter† They display banners hanging in what appear to be leafy areas of Shanghai. One describes the people who had died as a result of the government’s lockdown policies. Another simply read, “People are dying.” Another showed the text of a page that Chinese social media users see when they come across a page that has been removed by the censors: “Can’t view this content because it violates regulations.”
The next day, Gao says he received two calls from his local police station, requesting that the mail be deleted. He declined, and he says he hasn’t heard anything since.
In the past month, more Chinese citizens have been trying to access information outside the Great Firewall, said Zachery Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor at UCLA who leads a project that tracks people using Twitter from China. Users reach Twitter, which has been banned in China since 2009, usually through a virtual private network, which routes Internet traffic via an encrypted link to a computer outside of China. In April 2022, he saw a 41 percent increase, or just over 23,000 people, in visits to Twitter from Shanghai that bypassed internet controls, he says. “They are starting to follow pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and they are also starting to follow Chinese-language foreign news accounts. The Wall Street Journal China† BBC China† The New York Times AsiaSteinert-Threlkeld says of those who want to get around restrictions.
