To the list of things that should not be uttered in modern China, add these: Padded bras cause cancer. The Earth is on the brink of falling into a period of darkness for six days. Robots will soon conquer entire industries and eliminate the need for human labor.
These were among the seemingly trivial posts on WeChat (微信), a popular messaging app, that have been censored, according to a study by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Censorship in China is a well-known phenomenon, with bureaucrats working to augment the stature of leaders and restrict discussion of topics deemed controversial, such as Taiwan, but the Toronto researchers found that these faithful guardians of the Chinese Communist Party line have turned their attention to more mundane matters, devoting time and server strength to preventing rumors, fabricated news reports and superstitious premonitions from going viral.
“Online rumors can be viewed as a kind of social protest by citizens skeptical of official news,” Toronto researcher Jason Q. Ng (伍仟華) said.
WeChat, with 762 million monthly users, is hugely popular in China, where about nine out of 10 Internet users connect by mobile phone. It is primarily a chat app, but people also use it to buy movie tickets, pay bills and write public posts, similar to Facebook. One recent study showed that Chinese spend an average of 40 minutes per day using WeChat.
The university study examined 36,000 posts that had been shared publicly on third-party Web sites over nine months between 2014 and last year. The posts were not selected at random; the researchers made a point of monitoring several dozen users who had a history of sharing what the Chinese deemed sensitive content.
About 4 percent of those studied were censored, including musings on the safety of drinking water in China; speculation that several celebrities were on the verge of death; and supposition that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was undergoing secret medical treatment in China.
Zhao Yulian (趙玉蓮), 36, a technology entrepreneur, was thwarted when she recently tried to share an article about tips to avoid getting cancer.
“At some point you have to ask, why is this sensitive information?” she said.
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