Screenshots, blank sheets, sarcasm — How China residents aim to fight censorship of COVID protests

As the Chinese government raced to censor videos and images capturing the protests over COVID-19 policies, some residents actively downloaded them as soon as they surfaced on social media preempting China's authoritarian move.

"I started refreshing constantly, and saving videos, and taking screenshots of what I could before it got censored," 26-year-old Elliot Wang was quoted by Reuters as saying. "A lot of my friends were sharing the videos of the protests in Shanghai. I shared them too, but they would get taken down quickly."

The solidification of Xi Jinping's power in China made censorship more prominent in the country. A few months back, just ahead of the 20th CCP meet, some banners were put up with slogans against Xi. Authorities were quick to quash them, but protesters started used hashtag “I saw it” on Weibo to refer to the incident, without referring to it directly.

China maintains a tight grip on the country’s internet via a complex, multi-layered censorship operation. Their system blocks access to almost all foreign news and social media, and blocks topics and keywords considered politically sensitive or detrimental to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Videos of or calls to protest are usually deleted immediately, the report said.

Now, as the protests broke in parts of the country, hundreds of unhappy Chinese users took to the Chinese internet to express their anger on Saturday night. Several videos of protests in Shanghai were circulated on WeChat, a ubiquitous Chinese social networking platform used by over 1 billion.

They used methods to evade censors, which led to a brief period of time where government censors were overwhelmed, Reuters quoted Han Rongbin, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s International Affairs department, as saying.

“It takes censors some time to study what is happening and to add that to their portfolio in terms of censorship. So it’s a learning process for the government on how to conduct censorship effectively,” Han said.

Han, however, said that censorship “doesn't have to be perfect to be effective.” He said, "Censorship might be functioning to prevent a big enough size of the population from accessing the critical information to be mobilized."

These protests were triggered by a fire incident in Xinjiang region. Ten people were killed in the fire, while many believed that the strict COVID-19 curbs had hindered the rescue operations.

As people posted about the fire, censors took them down posts. This prompted Chinese internet users to use humour and metaphor to spread critical messages. “Chinese netizens have always been very creative because every idea used successfully once will be discovered by censors the next time,” said Liu Lipeng, a censor-turned-critic of China’s censorship practices.

Chinese users started posting images of blank sheets of white paper, said Liu, in a silent reminder of words they weren't allowed to post.

Others posted sarcastic messages like “Good good good sure sure sure right right right yes yes yes,” or used Chinese homonyms to evoke calls for President Xi Jinping to resign, such as “shrimp moss,” which sounds like the words for “step down” and “banana peel," which has the same initials as Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But within days, censors moved to contain images of white paper. They would have used a range of tools, said Chauncey Jung, a policy analyst. The report said that a person searching on Weibo on Thursday for the term “white paper” could mostly see posts that were critical of the protests, with no images of a single sheet of blank paper, or of people holding the white paper at protests.

Jung mentioned that most content censorship is not done by the state, but outsourced to content moderation operations at private social media platforms, which use a mix of humans and AI.

People hold sheets of paper in protest over coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions in mainland China. (Reuters)

Some censored posts are not deleted, but may be made visible only to the author, or removed from search results. In some cases, posts with sensitive key phrases may be published after review, Reuters reported.

It's possible to access the global internet from China by using technologies such as virtual private networks that disguise internet traffic, but these systems are illegal and many Chinese internet users access only the domestic internet.

“I think I can say for all the mainlanders in my generation that we are really excited,” said Wang. “But we’re also really disappointed because we can’t do anything. … They just keep censoring, keep deleting, and even releasing fake accounts to praise the cops," Wang said.

But the system works well enough to stop many users from ever seeing them.

A man holds white sheets of paper in protest over coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions after a vigil for the victims of a fire in Urumqi (Reuters)

Searching Twitter using the Chinese words for Shanghai or other Chinese cities reveals protest videos, but also also a near-constant flood of new posts showing racy photos of young women.

Some researchers proposed that a state-backed campaign could be seeking to drown out news of the protests with “not safe for work” content.

A preliminary analysis by the Stanford Internet Observatory found lots of spam but no “compelling evidence” that it was specifically intended to suppress information or dissent, said Stanford data architect David Thiel.

Workers in protective gear gather for their duties in Beijing, Monday, Nov. 28, 2022. (AP)

“I’d be sceptical of anyone claiming clear evidence of government attribution,” Thiel said in an email.

Twitter searches for more specific protest-related terms, such as “Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai,” produced mainly posts related to the protests.

Israeli data analysis firm Cyabra and another research group that shared analysis with the AP said it was hard to distinguish between a deliberate attempt to drown out protest information sought by the Chinese diaspora and a run-of-the-mill commercial spam campaign.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported. It hasn’t answered media inquiries since billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform in late October and cut back much of its workforce, including many of those tasked with moderating spam and other content. Musk often tweets about how he’s enacting or enforcing new Twitter content rules but hasn’t commented on the recent protests in China.