The China has so far maintained its position of neutrality, refusing to define Russian military actions in Ukraine a real invasionlet alone condemn fly. However, Chinese citizens are of a completely different opinion and are flocking to social media to express their feelings about the war: the social giants are moving to remove these posts.
China: Social media is removing inappropriate posts about Ukraine
In the past few days, topics related to the war in Ukraine have quickly sprung up among the trending hashtags on Weiboand this immediately set off the alarm bell for the public discussion on the Internet of the country. Meanwhile, Chinese social media giants have begun to remove information deemed “inappropriate” and “misleading” on the subject throughout the past week.
Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has removed more than 4,000 posts deemed war-friendly, war-teasing, or vulgar. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, instead removed over 3,500 videos that included profanity, content that trivialized war, aggressive information and hostile comments. Not a censorship in the strict sense as many would have expected then.
“Keeping the peace is not easy. We must respect and value life ”, he said WeChat in his statement. “We ask all online users to maintain an objective and rational attitude towards current global issues, be reasonable when participating in discussions and together maintain a clean and bright computing environment.”