The Great Firewall of China
China: social media Hobbits?
Ruled by communism, China is a country which is tightly governed, prohibiting its citizens from engaging in many “Western” influenced activities- the most predominant being its dis-engagement from social media platforms.
The Great Firewall of China, also known as the “Golden Shield Project” was implemented by Chinese government officials in December 2012, as a means of blocking undesired Western internet influencers launching into China’s digital sphere.
Censored material has been blocked from entering the realms of China’s online world, the initiative working to combat politically sensitive information to neutralise online use and operations nation wide.
This censorship has acted to silence much of the population, impeding individuals from free speech and basic democratic privileges of the contemporary (Western) world.
Prior to the firewall being put into place, “513 million Internet users” (Chiu, 2012, p.1) were recorded in December 2011. This leaves us with the big question mark- how does a country go from being one of the most proactive internet consumers to being one of the most highly constrained today?
China’s government has employed approximately 50,000 people to monitor the nation’s internet usage, with over 300,000 communist parties (that we know of) comprising of the surveillance team.
Blocking access from twenty five of the most global popular online sites, such as; Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, it seems that many of China’s citizens are somewhat hobbits to the concept of social media, unable to partake in the search engine freedom that many of us in other parts of the world frankly take for granted.
Although much of the top used global sites has been blocked from China, the launch of several other social media platforms established and approved by China itself have been largely popular in the nation.
“Weibo”, launched by Sina Corporation in 2009 is one of the most popular social media sites in China today, with over “500 million registered accounts and 50 million active accounts” (Wang, 2015, p.31) recorded in 2014.
Weibo, officially known as “Sina Weibo” functions as a Twitter feed would, allowing individuals to post text of a total of 140 Chinese characters, and attach URLs, images and videos with features such as the like button.
However speculation has rumoured this popular social media platform, with a study conducted by Hong Kong University in 2013 suggesting that the Chinese Government had in fact been “...utilising Weibo to develop more sophisticated mechanisms of online control” (Wang, 2015, p.32).
This highlights that although specifically tailored social media sites have been approved and are highly profitable in China’s online realm, “the Chinese people [may be] individually free, but collectively [are] in chains’ on the internet (King et al., 2013: 339).