![]() Instead, ideas are recycled from Western right-wing news and repackaged to highlight the perceived problems of Western societies. Writing about the government “re-education” camps for Western China’s Uighur minority is also extremely sensitive and would prompt severe punishment like the deletion of the user account altogether, but Chinese conservative discourse usually doesn’t touch those issues inside the country there’s very little information available. The very concept of controlling hate speech against ethnic groups or minorities has never been widely accepted or understood, and the Western idea of being “politically correct” tends to be dismissed-but topics like Taiwanese or Tibetan independence are treated with great caution. Instead, it focuses strictly on the expression of anti-government opinions and calls for offline protest. The video has been removed, but the shooter’s manifesto can be easily found on both platforms, alongside its Chinese translation.Ĭhina’s intricate and omnipresent censorship mechanism does not pay much attention to extremism or hate speech. (Facebook removed 1.5 million copies of the video in the 24 hours after the attack.) Weibo and WeChat followed suit, but under much less scrutiny. Hours after the gunman streamed the shooting live, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter raced to scrub their sites of the video. On Zhihu, China’s Quora-like Q&A platform, inaccurate translations of parts of the manifesto also spread widely. Another post, entitled “New Zealand massacre is not a terrorist attack,” quotes at length from the gunman’s manifesto and was shared in screenshots across WeChat groups. The article included a poll: 10,881 readers who participated, or 76 percent, responded that they were very or somewhat sympathetic to the shooter. An article titled “The names on the gunman’s magazines reflect the deep anxiety of European white men” that described the attacks as “heroic revenge” quickly surpassed 100,000 views (WeChat’s view count limit). WeChat, the world’s third-largest social media app at 1 billion users, is no exception. (The public discussions taking place under the posts of political commentators and individuals are even more unhinged.) The same pattern can be observed on the feeds of The Beijing News, Global Times, and other mainstream Chinese news outlets. Only two comments condemning the massacre made it to the top of the pile. Together they have been liked 1,590 times. Under those posts, seven “top” comments made statements that were explicitly anti-Muslim or in support of the shooter. ![]() One of China’s largest digital newspapers, ThePaper.cn, published fourteen news posts about the massacre to its 16 million followers. ICYMI: The White House released a troubling video last week attacking Washington Post But there has been a drastic rise since 2016,” Kecheng Fang, a veteran Chinese journalist and media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, tells me, noting the influence of the US presidential election. “Islamophobic speech on Chinese social media only comes from a small group of people. But again and again, the “most-liked” comments under mainstream media posts on Weibo are filled with hate speech. Many Weibo users posted emphatic rebuttals, and some wrote articles decrying anti-Muslim sentiment. Such comments aren’t representative of the Chinese population. Yet at the time of writing this comment is in the highest position of visibility and has been liked by more than 400 people. People’s Daily is China’s largest news outlet and the official state paper, and its comments section is heavily censored. The top comment under a video clip posted by People’s Daily likens Muslims to “cancer cells” and asks the Chinese government to avoid making the same mistakes as New Zealand. On Weibo-China’s Twitter equivalent, with 446 million monthly active users, 120 million more than Twitter-mainstream coverage of the attacks was barraged with comments that expressed anti-Muslim rhetoric and support for the shooter. In the wake of last Friday’s shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a wave of celebration hit Chinese social media.
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