communist censorship reigns over Chinese and American social networks

“Xi Jinping, resign!” The sentence is spoken by hundreds of protesters in Shanghai this weekend. All are demonstrating against the Chinese policy of “zero Covid”, adopted for almost three years in the Middle Kingdom. And they are not the only ones who no longer support the drastic measures imposed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Flooding Twitter with false information

In Beijing, students also demonstrated to denounce the management of the epidemic and the censorship that reigns on social networks. Claims that are far too audible for the Chinese government, which has decided to quickly attack. Now, the net police are cleaning up and deleting any content alluding to the protests.

So it is on Twitter, an application yet banned in China, that the demonstrators publish photos and videos of the rallies. But this is to forget the ingenuity of Chinese censorship which, to control the content of the demonstrators, this time calls on robots. The latter flood the American network with false information, including pornographic images, associated with the hashtag #China or #Beijing.

Elon Musk’s dilemma

“Twitter has always faced the difficulty of controlling information campaigns, official propaganda and fake news campaigns that come from China,” said Wall Street Journal reporter Liza Lin. “And now this problem is going to become Elon Musk’s problem. The concern with that is that he has a lot more exposure to the Chinese market than Twitter,” she continues.

Because in addition to owning Twitter, the richest man in the world is also the boss of Tesla, which sells half of its vehicles in China. If he were to regulate his disinformation operations, he would certainly expose himself to reprisals from the Chinese government.