Internet outrage: China’s censorship takes action against video blocking
04/23/2022, 22:48
Shanghai has been under lock and key again for days. A video showing the negative consequences of the measures prompted censorship authorities to act. The outrage then spread across the internet.
A six-minute video about the effects of the ongoing corona lockdown on Shanghai residents triggered Chinese censorship. The deletion of the video sparked outrage online. Since the beginning of April, the 25 million inhabitants of the Chinese economic metropolis can hardly leave their homes. In this way, the authorities want to contain the worst corona outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic.
However, the authorities are hardly able to cushion the consequences for the prisoners: the city has problems providing its residents with fresh food or getting them to receive medical care because the health service is mainly needed for corona tests and treatments.
The video, posted by an anonymous account, deftly addresses these issues: Simple black-and-white aerial photos of deserted Shanghai are initially accompanied by statements to the press in which officials still assure at the start of the outbreak in March that they were implementing a lockdown on the metropolis rejected because of the economic impact.
“The video only shows bare facts”
This is followed by audio recordings of complaints from a man whose sick father is not being treated in a hospital, a woman who cannot return home after chemotherapy in the hospital, or a mother who asks neighbors for antipyretics for her mid-term baby. of the night begging
It took hours for censors to delete the video from online networks because users kept uploading it to different cloud servers. Users reacted indignantly to the deletion: “The video only shows bare facts, there is nothing provocative”, criticized one of them. “Content is not new – but the fact that it is even being censored worries me,” wrote another.
In the afternoon, the video titled “Voice of April” was still available on YouTube, but not on any of the major Chinese online platforms. In protest, netizens shared video clips of the songs “Do You Hear the People Sing?” on the WeChat short message service. and “Another Brick In The Wall”: The first song of the musical “Les Misérables” calls for rebellion, while the Pink Floyd classic opposes “mind control” among other things.