Censorship default global implemented: Zoom leans, China

China enforces its censorship requirements, increasingly in social networks beyond the own national borders. The two former student leader, Zhou Fengsuo, and Wang Dan, to feel, living for decades in the United States, received recently. Your accounts at the Online conference App Zoom have been locked after they had held a virtual memorial event on the anniversary of the crushing of the Chinese democracy movement in 1989. The Same applies for the Hong Kong activist Lee Cheuk-yan, although the Chinese censorship rules apply in Hong Kong.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for East Asia.

A statement that the three received only after media had reported about it. The American company Zoom confirmed on Friday that it had terminated after the request of the Chinese government, three virtual Tiananmen-vigils and the accounts of the organizer is locked, because these activities in China were illegal. In two cases, meetings had been noted during the on-line on the basis of IP addresses "a significant number of participants from the Chinese mainland". In the third case, that had been according to a note from Beijing for a previous event is reviewed, which had been initiated by the concerned account. A fourth meeting, which wanted to prevent Beijing was held, therefore, freely, because no-one from China, a chose.

The company attributed the blocking of the accounts of the three activists across the Chinese mainland, in order that it have the technical capabilities to block participants on the Basis of your location. This gap should be closed in the coming days. The opinion referred to in Zoom want to exclude so also, in the future, Chinese participants of the global talks if the government in Beijing calls for this. Fears that phone calls had been tapped on the keywords back, came to the company with the note that it has been informed Beijing in advance about the events that had been announced on social networks.

Twitter offset the influence of pursuit of a damper on

The American organization Humanitarian China, its Chairman Zhou Fengsuo is accused Zoom "to make the obliteration of the memory of the Tiananmen square massacre complicit". Zhou even announced that on the virtual Meeting approximately 250 people have participated, including mothers whose children are in the bloody Army in the night to 4. June 1989 in Beijing had been killed. The accounts of the three activists in America and in Hong Kong were reactivated after media reports about their cases. All three stated that Zoom didn't respond to E-Mail requests.

another American Software company offset the Chinese influence in pursuit of a small damper: Twitter put out more than 23,000 accounts, which it has identified as part of a coordinated influence campaign by the Chinese government. A further 150,000 accounts were locked because they had been used as an "amplifier" for a "manipulative and coordinated activities," said Twitter. In contrast to Zoom-Twitter in the Chinese Internet is blocked.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which analyzed Twitter data provided, identified four main themes among the of these accounts, popular messages: the protests in Hong Kong, Covid-19, Taiwan, and the living in America billionaire Guo Wengui, who propagated a plan to overthrow the Chinese regime. With References to the protests in America, China also tries to create the impression of a "moral Equivalence with the suppression of the protests in Hong Kong".