Twitter or Facebook, as well as other social networks and apps, are censored or regulated in some way in China. In order to communicate through them or cultivate microblogging, then, Internet users residing in this country use Weibo , a platform perfectly regulated by a body of more than a thousand people dedicated to controlling the content that is published.
It is not surprising that there are so many people monitoring content on a single platform if we take into account that Weibo is used by 30% of users , that is, a similar percentage to the users that Twitter has in the United States; However, in China there are 1.4 billion people, and in the United States “only” there are just over 300 million.
So that Weibo users do not miss the news that appears on Twitter, there are young Chinese activists who are dedicated to copying some of their tweets on Weibo using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which allows them to connect from China pretending that they do it from another country, thus avoiding local censorship.
Many of these tweets that are translated are harmless. They are usually limited to information from American movie stars, Hollywood movies, or music. If more politically compromised tweets were copied, then Chinese censorship would soon remove them, as well as other uncomfortable messages.
However, censorship rarely resorts to simple deletion and this is usually more subtle : instead of eliminating messages that should not be published, algorithms are modified to give visibility to the message so that it is hardly seen by anyone. In this way, it receives fewer ‘retweets’ and, in short, accumulates less impact.
In general, this type of surveillance is automated, and alarms go off when keywords are detected. But the important thing is that the user does not feel that he is being explicitly censored, even if he may suspect it. In this way, the dissident user unburdens himself, although almost no one reads to him, which benefits both sides. There are only cases of systematic and direct censorship in very flagrant cases of political dissent .
Weibo already has more users than Twitter globally. Despite this incredible growth, the social network that reigns in China by number of users is still WeChat , a kind of increased WhatsApp, which is also subject to the rigors of control that exist on Weibo.
Such a number of potential users, in addition to automated surveillance, and a good number of “network policemen”, requires other elements that Frédéric Martel describes in his book Smart. Internet (s): an investigation : “The regime pays political trolls who pretend to be ordinary Internet users, but who are actually there to convey false rumors or disturb conversations. They are called the 50 Cent party , because the party pays them fifty cents for each post. “
The Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China regularly conducts training sessions for these 50 Cent Party , after which the participants are subjected to an exam that they must pass in order to obtain the “certificate of aptitude”. The exact number that makes up this group is not known, but some estimate that there are several hundred thousand.
All effort is little to control what is said. For China, it is not so much about censorship as about harmonization. “It is the central idea of Confucius but also of former President Hu Jintao . In China dissensions, opponents and opposition are poorly tolerated.”
For this reason, sometimes you also have to nip it in the bud. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the department in charge of censorship in the Asian country’s networks, announced in November the suspension of 9,800 accounts on social networks, both Weibo and WeChat, considering that they published information that was located outside the established legal frameworks, that is to say, they violated the long-awaited “harmonization” of citizenship.
