Credit Illustration by Cari Vander Yacht



Censorship in China is a well-known phenomenon, with bureaucrats working assiduously to augment the stature of leaders and restrict discussion of topics deemed controversial, such as Tibet and Taiwan. But the Toronto researchers found that these faithful guardians of the Communist Party line have turned their attention to more mundane matters, devoting time and server strength to preventing rumors, fabricated news reports and superstitious premonitions from going viral.

“Online rumors can be viewed as a kind of social protest by citizens skeptical of official news,” explained Jason Q. Ng, one of the Toronto researchers.

WeChat, with 762 million monthly users, is hugely popular in China, where about nine out of 10 internet users connect by mobile phone. It is primarily a chat app, but people also use it to buy movie tickets, pay bills and write public posts, similar to Facebook. One recent study showed that Chinese people spend an average of 40 minutes per day using WeChat.

The University of Toronto study examined 36,000 posts that had been shared publicly on third-party websites over nine months between 2014 and 2015. The posts were not selected at random; the researchers made a point of monitoring several dozen users who had a history of sharing what the Chinese deemed sensitive content.

About four percent of those studied were censored, including musings on the safety of drinking water in China; speculation that several celebrities were on the verge of death; and supposition that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was undergoing secret medical treatment in China.

Zhao Yulian, 36, a technology entrepreneur, was thwarted when she recently tried to share an article about tips to avoid getting cancer. “At some point,” she said, “you have to ask, Why is this sensitive information?”

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