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According to someone familiar with the matter, the original video uploaded by the creator reached 5 million views before it was taken down. Given how many times it was re-uploaded, the video could easily have reached millions of Chinese that night. Yet the sympathetic stories commenting on each version and video were censored almost instantly.
The intensity of censorship in China this late at night was surprising, he says. Eric Liu, a former internet censorship in China currently working with the US-based China Digital Times publication. “The rate at which posts are censored in seconds [of publishing], it seemed really unusual to me. Requires many orders [censorship] Employees should work overtime.”
two screenshots showing leaked orders from local governments also went online to remove video-related content. Worded differently, both orders asked tech companies to “clean up” any video, screenshot, or derivative content “without exception.” The authenticity of the screenshots is difficult to verify, but Liu, who once worked at China’s censorship machine, said the terminology used indicates that the screenshots are likely legitimate.
History repeats itself… with a WeChat twist
This isn’t the first time censorship has triggered a heated grassroots protest online during the pandemic. it happened that night Chinese informant doctor Li Wenliang A story about another Chinese doctor Ai Fen—when he was applauded as “The Whistle Giver”—died and died again.heavily censored.
What’s different this time around is the new video, which is being rolled out massively through WeChat Channels, a teenage video-sharing product that Tencent is struggling to build an audience. Channels allow a user to post videos for up to an hour, which can then be both shared with friends and distributed to the public through WeChat’s algorithms.
The channels were launched in January 2020 in response to the explosive popularity of Douyin, the native version of TikTok. In the two years since then, Tencent has used every tool to promote Channels, including offering monetary incentives for creators, live-streaming concerts by A-list celebrities, and bundling the product with WeChat, an app already used by more than a billion people.
Still, the popularity of Channels gradually increased. Average time a user spends on Channels per day, even though it currently has almost as many users as Douyin 35 minutes, a third of Douyin’s 107 minutes.
However, on the night of April 22, WeChat Channels came to the fore.
Ironically, it was Tencent’s own product decisions that made it easy for Channels to become a tool of protest. To attract new users, WeChat has made it extremely easy for users to sign up for a Channel account (although it can take days for a traditional broadcasting account registration in WeChat to be approved). This made it possible for many people to open public accounts and instantly upload hundreds of versions of the video.
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