2015-03-13
A mobile phone user uses the mobile messaging app Weixin, or WeChat, on his smartphone in Yichang, central China’s Hubei province, Feb. 4, 2015.
ImagineChina
China’s online censors have launched a further round of account closures on popular social media sites in a bid to silence critical debate surrounding the annual session of its rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, online commentators said on Friday.
“I have heard of a lot of [activist and commentator] friends who have had their microblog accounts closed in the past few days,” Guangzhou-based rights activist Jia Pin told RFA.
“I think this has to do with the fact that they want to tighten the reins on public opinion and debate during the parliamentary sessions,” he said.
“They are probably worried that there will be too many of the sorts of opinions they don’t want to see online,” Jia said.
He said the sorts of commentators being targeted are those most likely to criticize the ruling Chinese Communist Party online.
“Mostly, it’s any comments that are critical of them, or complaining that their policies haven’t been delivered on the ground,” Jia said. “They are terrified of that sort of thing.”
He said this year’s online censorship sweep isn’t the first. “It happened last year as well, but it wasn’t as ferocious as this year,” Jia said.
More account closures
Online free speech advocate Wu Bin, known online by his nickname Xiucai Jianghu, said he has never seen account closures and deletion on the scale of the current campaign on China’s Twitter-like social media platforms.
“My accounts on Tencent and Sina Weibo have been deleted, one after another,” Wu said. “However many I had, that’s how many were deleted.”
“The level of account closures on Tencent Weibo has been unprecedented in recent history,” he said.
“In the most extreme case, they also deleted accounts belonging to my wife and my friends.”
Wu said the account deletions appeared not to be linked to the actual content he was tweeting.
“Some of them were accounts that contained very mild statements,” he said. “I think Tencent must have had some orders from central government, and that they’re going after accounts based on a [government] blacklist.”
“This round of account closures isn’t based on the content tweeted by an account, but on whether the person who holds the accounts is routinely critical of the government,” Wu said.
“Some people even had accounts deleted that they had never tweeted from.”
