“Anyone who brings in outside forces to get involved is a complete traitor!”
“I understand that the gathering organized this time was by…the Department of State of America.”
“Do not be led astray by outside forces. Either way, you must love your country!
These comments are far from unusual on the Chinese Weibo social media site.
A range of users – from those with a handful of followers (referred to as “fans” on the platform) to those with millions of followers – have repeated that “external forces” are responsible for the protests that have took place across the country. in the last days.
Rallies against China’s unusually strict zerocovid the measures spread to several cities over the weekend in the biggest show of opposition to the ruling Communist Party in decades.
The number of protesters has now dwindled, likely in part due to low temperatures and a heavy police presence at key locations.
Although Chinese authorities have not directly commented on the gatherings, they have repeatedly warned that “foreign forces” pose a threat to national security and have interfered in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This warning has been repeated by figures associated with the Chinese Communist Party, such as Ren Yi, the grandson of Communist Party leader Ren Zhongyi.
Ren Yi has nearly two million fans on Weibo, where he writes under the username Chairman Rabbit.
In a recent article, he asked “what anti-China forces overseas expect most” from the protests and why “foreign forces…came out to make noise and then retreated.”
Popular TV commentator and pundit Yu Li, whose Weibo username is Sima Nan and has 3.16 million fans, jokes in a post that he wants to thank foreign forces for their interference in the protests .
He writes: “If the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy has an office in Beijing, please let me know the address and contact details, and I intend to send them a gift.
The idea that the US Central Intelligence Agency was implicated in the protests appears in a number of posts from Weibo users.
In particular, a screenshot of a news article reporting that the CIA is looking to hire more Chinese speakers is widely shared.
Another widely circulated image is a snapshot of when a BBC Cameraman was arrested by Chinese police while covering the protests.
Officials say Ed Lawrence was arrested “for his own good” in case he caught COVID from the mob. He was released after being beaten and detained for several hours.
One of the users who posted a photo of Mr Lawrence called him a ‘little idiot’ and commented ‘we must not allow outside forces to interfere in our internal disputes’.
Another Weibo user made an unfounded accusation against Mr Lawrence, saying he was a ‘British agent who was caught impersonating a BBC journalist’. The account did not provide any evidence to support the claim.
The BBC confirmed that Mr Lawrence was a member of staff and worked as an “accredited journalist”.
Accusations of interference by foreign forces in the protests also appear on other social media sites.
Two Chinese Twitter users with a combined follower count of 53,400 have posted what they claim is evidence Westerners are using an encrypted messaging app to plan the protest.
One of the messages, written in English, accused this Telegram group of “planning” the demonstration in Shanghai
The message on Telegram provided a time, a meeting place and instructions to bring a white piece of paper, a symbol borrowed by those protesting in China from protesters in Hong Kong.
Sky News found the Telegram chat but the messages weren’t there. They could have been removed.
As this wave of chauvinistic social media posts spilled onto Weibo and other platforms, signs of China’s notorious internet censorship rules could also be seen.
Posts mentioning Shanghai, a Chinese city that has seen major protests, appear to have been deleted en masse from Weibo.
This screenshot shows that a search for 上海 (Shanghai) returned less than 1,000 results.
While this screenshot for 北京 (Beijing), a comparable city in terms of size and population, generated almost 40 million visits.
Weibo openly states on its platform that content is monitored and may be removed.
In addition to the deleted posts, those seeking information on the protests have to contend with volumes of spam flooding social media.
Benjamin Strick, director of investigations for the Center for Information Resilience, identified more than 3,000 posts on Twitter that include hashtags for some of the cities in China where protests are taking place.
It says these messages are used to “spamm the tags with dating ads”.
Many accounts have been created recently and have few or no followers. Some 2,000 tweets use the text “I’m single, can I get married on Twitter”.
“For journalists or researchers looking for what’s happening in China at specific locations. That’s what they’re browsing,” Strick tweeted.
It is not possible to know whether spam messages are burying protest messages on purpose or by coincidence, nor can we measure the number of messages deleted from sites like Weibo.
But some groups are fighting back.
Greatfire.org is a China-based group that challenges Chinese censorship. It operates sites such as freeweibo.com which captures posts before they are removed from the official Weibo platform and publishes them so that they remain visible online.
Searching for terms such as “protest” or “white paper” brings up a large number of prohibited comments. A link to the deleted post (which now displays as an error message) on Weibo is also provided.
Despite the levels of censorship facing Chinese citizens, protesters have found a way to spread information to the world, like this video showing a man being dragged into a police car.
One of Greatfire.org’s co-founders, Charlie Smith (not his real name), told Sky News that the events of the past week show the censors are “fallible”.
He said: “These protests really show how fallible China’s online censorship apparatus is… [and] what happened this weekend shows that many Chinese are well aware of what is happening in the country.
“Yes, there is widespread censorship on social media in China, but the protests this weekend illustrate that history cannot be erased.”
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