Chinas Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users Locations – The New York Times

One hashtag calling for the feature to be revoked quickly accumulated 8,000 posts and was viewed more than 100 million times before it was censored in late April. A university student in Zhejiang province sued Weibo, the Chinese social platform, in March for leaking personal information without his consent when the platform automatically showed his location. Others have pointed out the hypocrisy of the practice, since celebrities, government accounts, and the chief executive of Weibo have all been exempted from the location tags.

Despite the pushback, the authorities have signaled the changes are likely to last. An article in the state-run publication, China Comment, argued the location labels were necessary to cut off the black hand manipulating the narratives behind the internet cable. A draft regulation from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the countrys internet regulator, stipulates that user I.P. addresses must be displayed in a prominent way.

If censorship is about dealing with the messages and those who send the messages, this mechanism is really working on the audience, said Han Rongbin, a media and politics professor at the University of Georgia.

With the worsening relationship with United States and China and propaganda repeatedly blaming malign foreign forces for dissatisfaction in China, Mr. Han said the new policy could be quite effective at snuffing out complaints.

People worrying about foreign interference is a tendency right now. Thats why it works better than censorship. People buy it, he said.

Discontent among the population. The Chinese governments censorship and surveillance, which the pandemic has aggravated, are pushing a small but growing group of Chinese to look for an exit. Younger Chinese in particular are embracing the view that they might need to fleethe country in the pursuit of a safer and brighter future abroad.

A new trick for internet censors. To control the countrys internet, Chinas censors have relied for years on practices like on deleting posts, suspending accounts and blocking keywords. Now they have turned to displaying users locationson social media,fueling pitched online battles that link Chinese citizens locations with their national loyalty.

An uncertain harvest. Chinese officials are issuing warnings that, after heavy rainfalls last autumn, a disappointing winter wheat harvestin June could drive food prices already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States further up, compounding hunger in the worlds poorest countries.

A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalitiesand usher in a new era of common prosperity. Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.

The vitriol can be overwhelming. One Chinese citizen, Mr. Li, who spoke on the condition that only his surname be used for privacy reasons, was targeted by trolls after his profile was linked to the United States, where he lived. Nationalist influencers accused him of working from overseas to incite protest in western China over a post that criticized the local government of handling a students sudden death. The accounts listed him and several others as examples of spy infiltration. A post to publicly shame them was liked 100,000 times before it was eventually censored.

Inundated by derogatory messages, he had to change his Weibo user name to stop harassers from tracing him. Even though he has used Weibo for more than 10 years, he is wary of the baseless attacks these days. They want me to shut up, so Ill shut up, Mr. Li said.

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Chinas Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users Locations - The New York Times