In our newsletter 33, we introduced a Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), an equivalent of Instagram for China. The newsletter told how the official Weibo account of Xiaohongshu got itself suspended on the day of June 4th, 2021.
It turns out Xiaohongshu heavily censors its own users all the time. On July 14th, China Digital Times published an article on secret documents leaked to them on Xiaohongshu censorship efforts. The leaked documents contains 143 pages of case studies of online speech between February 2020 and August 2020. It also contains a description of the operation of censorship of Xiaohongshu. It is a rare window into how censorship works in Chinese internet companies.
You can read the article (in Chinese) Xiaohongshu Censorship Encyclopedia and you can even read the original documents.
In Xiaohongshu, there is a department dedicated to censorship. There are two kinds of censorship: the orders directly from the government, and the internal censorship. The processes are described in the file.
A quick summary: when an order comes from the government, Xiaohongshu will set up a team to respond. The team leader will assign team members to search and tag original posts and videos. The team leader will come up with a set of keywords and distributes them to the members to search and delete any related posts. During the process, new keywords and extended keywords are added to the system by the leader. This search is done both on the frontend and backend.
After the first taking down of the content, more detailed search will continue, statistics are created to monitor and ensure the censorship continues. Finally, statistics and reports will be sent to the supervisors, and problems will be discussed to ensure improvement of work efficiency.
An internal censorship is triggered by a viral event on the platform. The leaked documents do not defined how to determine such event, but indicate that a team must be setup and start the censorship process within 5 minutes.
The events that need to be censored are those “potentially triggering political or social shakeups, threatening the security of the state”, or “any criticism targeting the CCP or the government”.
One of the key areas is to protect our dear supreme leader. Many sensitive words were created to interrupt people from “humiliating Baozi” (RuBao in Chinese), because some people really enjoy creating new ways to express themselves. And it is a cat and mouse game now. In two months, Xiahongshu created 567 sensitive words. Sensitive words are then used to trigger the suspension of the user, or to make some comments invisible to others.
Other key areas include Hong Kong, criticizing traditional Chinese medicine, homosexuality, wrong attitude towards marriage, independence of Taiwan, and surprise, anything to do with the June 4th 1989 massacre.
Xiaohongshu has three offices in China and each office has a censor department. We don’t know how many people work in Xiaohongshu for censorship precisely, but some estimates that there are around one million people working in speech censorship across China in various companies and governments offices. When including supporting workers, such as people who are doing the technical work of quality control, tagging and operation, the workforce can be estimated around two millions.
Xuan Kejiong, a reporter in Shanghai published a poem on Weibo on July 15th. The poem is about cicadas, it goes like this:
Shut up!
I am talking about you
You are high up there
Making noise
Making it feel hotter
You think you are smart
Fat head big ears
In the earth
you hide
more than 5 years
Then you crawl out
You use your ass
Sing songs to praise the summer
Ignorant of the misery of the hot summer
Who do you think you are talking about smart ass?
Within 30 minutes of posting the poem, Mr. Xuan saw the comments and realized that this simple poem has malicious meaning. He took down the post himself. But too late, by that time, screenshots of this evil poem were circulating far and wide.
Mr. Xuan’s boss summoned him for a lecture.
Weibo suspended his account.
Some people say, it is the line “Fat head big ears” that brings the trouble. No one knows but it just happened, and everyone is talking about the saga on Twitter.
Jay Chou is super popular in China. He recently published a new album. This is a huge event since this is his first album in 6 years. Millions of fans streamed his songs hundreds of millions of times within hours. You can listen to the songs on his YouTube channel.
Still, some smart ass dared to write this:
(rough translation): I just heard the new song of Jay Chou, I have to say, bro, you got to retire with dignity at your age, then you got your face and every one else is happy, right?
Bro, you just insisted to stay, and made things every so often, and thought that you were doing very well with self indulgence. At the beginning, everyone humours you and give you some face. As time goes by, just look at how everyone is calling you names behind your back. Inside the country and outside, who is not looking at you as a big joke. Get off quickly, bro.
Who do you think he is writing about? One comment made it clear that people understand it:
Don’t you think that I don’t know who you are insulting here.
It seems Weibo agrees with the commentator, so the account is gone.
A twitter user just found out that her post on a cooking website from 7 years ago was deleted for violating the community rules. She was very puzzled so she posted it on Twitter to ask what went wrong with her message:
(rough translation): I did this for the first time two weeks ago, because the egg white was not hard enough, so it shrunk a lot once inside the fridge. But the feels in the mouth is not bad. Even though it has very low calorie, it tastes like Cheese cake. It can deceive the taste buds.
Many helpful twitter users enlightened her:
… did this for the first time … the egg … not hard enough …inside … shrunk …
Eventually she acknowledged that she was guilty of writing a porn story.
But it is not over. It turned out that everyone was wrong.
The next day, she updated the story: a programmer of the cooking website contacted her and told her that the problem is not that post but the second one she wrote. In it she said she replaced the sugar with sweetener, so her guilt of calorie is zero. Of course twitter users quickly told her the “zero” is the sensitive word.
If you remember, China’s signature COVID policy is called the “zero policy”. So, a retroactive search on the keyword “zero” resulted in her posts being deleted. But it’s just a guess!