Chinese authorities follow participants in anti-restriction rallies via their mobile phones, but also via social networks.
For more than a week, protests have been taking place in China against the “zero Covid” policy that has been in place since the beginning of the pandemic, subjecting the population to repeated screenings and strict lockdowns. Such a widespread insurgency is extremely rare in China given the crackdown on any form of anti-government opposition.
Beijing has also suppressed the demonstrations by arresting participants and blocking passageways used, but also searching for protesters. For example, some who protested against health restrictions but also for more freedoms in Beijing on Sunday were contacted by telephone by the police, who questioned them about their presence at the rally, one of them told AFP.
This raises the question of how the police managed to find out the identity of certain demonstrators when the vast majority of them did not have their identity papers checked during the rally on Sunday.
Find protesters by phone
American media outlet CNN had access to a recording between a protester and a police officer confirming that Chinese authorities are using cellphone data to locate the protesters.
The policeman asked the protester on the phone if he was at the Liangma River on Sunday, a place in Beijing where anti-restriction rallies were taking place. The person denies being there, to which law enforcement responds, “Why did your cell phone number show up there?” In China, cellphone users must register their real name and national ID number, CNN explains.
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A protester told the AFP news agency on Monday evening that she and five of her comrades, who were also demonstrating in the capital on Sunday, had received a call from the Beijing police.
The police officer “said my name and asked me if I had been by the Liangma River last night… He specifically asked me how many people were there, when I would be there, how I found out about it,” the protester said. who asked for anonymity for security reasons.
“Police pointed out that last night’s protest was illegal and asked if we had any demands that we would like to let them know through legal channels,” she added.
Prevent sharing of content on social networks
The demonstrators are also trying to protest on social networks, despite significant censorship by the Chinese authorities, which have removed, for example, keywords linked to the rallies and banned the use of certain applications.
In Shanghai, an AFP journalist who witnessed multiple arrests found police forcibly checking a protester’s phone for foreign social media apps blocked in China, which some are using to break news of events.
The Chinese government has also attempted to drown out online searches on some platforms using the keywords used to send many other messages unrelated to the protests, such as pornography.
“You had a lot of news that put you on porn or escort sites, the idea was to bury and spread the news” of the demonstrators, explains on our antenna Véronique Reille-Soult, opinion expert, social networks and President from backbone consulting.
Chinese news site China Digital Timespublished government notes expressing fears that the population might override existing censorship and called for strengthening the management of published content.
How people bypass censorship
On Chinese social networks and encrypted applications, which are inaccessible in China without special software, protesters exchange advice, including legal advice, on what to do if they are arrested or questioned by the police.
“They try to go through platforms that are a little less controlled by the authorities. We have Telegram and Twitter, for example, which have a resurgent interest. It’s a way for them to not only share pictures (…), but also to meet and make fun of the censorship,” says Véronique Reille-Soult.
To continue posting content on social networks, the Chinese use various techniques such as filtering videos, adding music unrelated to the protest, or capturing videos of videos such as: explains a journalist from New York on Twitter.
For video, “when analyzing the video content, the algorithm looks at each pixel and tries to associate it with something it already knows,” Victor Louis Pouchet, a hacker at BZhunt, told 20 minutes. Filters or other added elements act like parasites on the detection tool, which can then miss the true meaning of the posted images.
They also use “keywords that you don’t expect, for example you have the word ‘banana peel’ which is used a lot because in Chinese it’s the same initials as Xi Jinping or ‘shrimp moss’ because it sounds like the word resign “Said Véronique Reille-Soult.
In the wake of the massive protests, several Chinese cities eased current draconian anti-Covid rules this week, with President Xi Jinping arguing that the less deadly Omicron variant of the virus allows for “more than just flexibility”. The protests of the past few days are due to the fact that people are “frustrated” after three years of the epidemic, Xi Jinping explained.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
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