surprise! WeChat censors news about coronavirus in China

As the Chinese government is responding to the coronavirus epidemic, it has also tried to control what information is available about the virus. Since early January, WeChat – China’s most popular messaging platform – has censored keywords related to the recent outbreak of the corona virus.

This emerges from Citizen Lab a Toronto-based research group that has scripted group chat conversations and sent them to three test WeChat accounts &#821

1; two in Canada and the other in China . The scripted news contained headlines and articles about the virus. Researchers found that 132 keyword combinations were censored in January, but it was 516 by February. Caption: An illustration from Citizen Lab shows a user trying to send messages using the censored keyword combination.

To [19659003] The article published yesterday by Citizen Lab stated that the censored content criticized the Chinese government, rumors and speculative information about the epidemic, neutral evidence of the Chinese government’s efforts to combat the outbreak and references to Dr. Li Wenliang the doctor who was one of the earliest to try to warn the public about the virus. He died in February after becoming infected while treating patients.

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Citizen Lab researchers found 19 censored keyword combinations that referred to Dr. Li Wenliang, such as “epidemic + virus + Li Wenliang + central government” and “coronavirus + transmission from person to person + Li Wenliang”.

In addition to WeChat, the report also found that the popular Chinese were found to have the YY live streaming app censor keywords and important information related to the COVID 19 outbreak. This has happened since December 31, 2019 – the day doctors tried to warn the public about the virus.

In a statement to Buzzfeed a Tencent spokesman said: “We have introduced a variety of tools and features on the platform to help users stay safe and protect themselves from the ongoing coronavirus epidemic to protect. This includes exposing false rumors. “

WeChat currently has over 1.15 billion active users per month and censoring important information about the outbreak is only putting them at greater risk. At the time of writing, the total number of coronavirus cases worldwide exceeded 93,000 with more than 3,200 deaths and China announced a decrease in reported infections.