{"id":87140,"date":"2019-05-22T08:16:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T08:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=87140 "},"modified":"2019-05-22T08:16:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T08:16:00","slug":"87140-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=87140","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s Afraid of China\u2019s Internet Vigilantes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>When social media emerged in my country almost 10 years ago, my peers and I were excited. Here was a space where Chinese people like us could share everything, we thought, from bits of daily life to our unvarnished views on public affairs. We were na\u00efvely optimistic back then about the prospect, as a famous phrase at the time put it, of \u201conlookers changing China.\u201d<\/div><div>\u00a0<\/div><div><\/div><div>Things did not turn out that way. Nearly a decade later, the growing silence on social media when it comes to sensitive public issues is deafening. Most of us now refrain from posting things that are potentially controversial. That\u2019s in part because of tightened censorship. But it\u2019s also because of a phenomenon called \u201crenrou sousuo,\u201d or \u201chuman flesh search\u201d \u2014 the deliberate marshaling of the forces of the internet against those deemed harmful to the public good. This, in its own way, has been just as responsible for the chilling effect.<\/div><div>\u00a0<\/div><div><\/div><div>The term sounds creepy \u2014 and it is. \u201cHuman flesh searches\u201d are all about punishing people whom the cyberspace masses decide are deserving of public attention and scorn. It\u2019s effectively an effort to use crowdsourcing to reveal and broadcast the real-life identities of those who had been essentially anonymous online \u2014 call it doxxing with Chinese characteristics.<\/div><div>\u00a0<\/div><div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/14\/opinion\/china-privacy.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FFreedom%20and%20Human%20Rights%20in%20China&#038;action=click&#038;contentCollection=world&#038;region=stream&#038;module=stream_unit&#038;version=latest&#038;contentPlacement=3&#038;pgtype=collection\">Read more\u00a0<\/a><\/div><div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&lt;div&gt;It isn&amp;#8217;t just government censorship that is restricting free expression in China. It&amp;#8217;s also the &amp;#8220;human flesh searches.&amp;#8221;&lt;\/div&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}