China Using WeChat, Twitter To Silence People Sharing Coronavirus Information: Report

The Chinese government has reportedly issued a crackdown on people sharing details about the measures taken to battle Coronavirus in the country. The government is actively tracking social media users on WeChat and Twitter sharing news about the measures and is working towards silencing them, according to new reports.

Any information that is considered to be negative information regarding the virus outbreak is tracked and the government’s “regulatory” measures are put in place.

Vice reported Monday that WeChat administrators were sending warning messages to even users outside China, who were sharing information about the outbreak. The Chinese government went as far as getting WeChat contacts to ask users abroad for specific details about their location and phone number.

The Chinese government is going all out to control the narrative. It is leveraging online platforms for doing so. Even though Twitter is banned inside China, users are able to log in using virtual private networks (VPNs). Many citizens who tweeted negative information about the Chinese government’s campaign of fighting the outbreak were informed that they were tracked by finding the phone number attached to their Twitter account. However, Twitter has stated that it has not shared any such information with the government. It instead pointed out that the data is controlled by local telcos which have access to the traffic.

China has received widespread criticism and there was a period during which information was coming out of the country freely. However, that may just have been a lull in the process because of the Chinese Lunar New Year Celebrations. Now, it seems that the censors are back at their posts and are working to control the spread of information about the Coronavirus outbreak, even though the Chinese authorities are yet to control the outbreak of the virus itself.

It is a challenge for the censors also, as the information about Coronavirus needs to go out, but they want to control every criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis.

In small towns such as Xiantao, located in the virus-affected Hubei province, even mentioning the outbreak in group chats and retweeting anything that goes against the official line of the Chinese Communist Party has been outlawed.