While it now has almost as many users as Douyin, the average time a user spends on Channels daily is 35 minutes, one-third of Douyin’s 107 minutes.īut on the night of April 22, WeChat Channels took center stage. In the two years since, Tencent has used every tool to promote Channels, including offering monetary incentives for creators, live-streaming concerts by A-list celebrities, and bundling the product with WeChat, an app that’s already used by more than a billion. Channels allows a user to post videos as long as one hour, which can then both be shared with friends and distributed to the public through WeChat’s algorithms.Ĭhannels was released in January 2020 in response to the explosive popularity of TikTok’s domestic version, Douyin. What’s different this time is the new video spread largely through WeChat Channels, a young video-sharing product that Tencent has struggled to build an audience for. It happened the night when the whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang died and again when a story about another Chinese doctor, Ai Fen-applauded as “The Whistle-Giver”- was rigorously censored. This is not the first time during the pandemic that censorship has triggered a heated grassroots protest online. While worded differently, the orders both asked tech companies to “clean up” any video, screenshot, or derivative content “without exceptions.” It’s hard to confirm the screenshots’ authenticity, but Liu, having once worked in China’s censorship machine, said the terminology used suggests they are likely legitimate. Two screenshots showing leaked orders from local governments to remove content relevant to the video also appeared online. It requires ordering many employees to work overtime.” “The speed in which posts are censored, within seconds, made it seem really uncommon to me. Censorship of such intensity happening so late at night in China was surprising, says Eric Liu, a former internet censor in China who’s now working with the US-based outlet China Digital Times.
0 kommentar(er)
