In Hong Kong, a digital memorial of the Tiananmen Square massacre disappears
The 1989 massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is perhaps the most aggressively censored topic on the Chinese internet. For more than two decades now, the anniversary of the massacre, on June 4, has been commemorated online with photographs from the demonstrations, messages honoring victims and emojis of candles symbolizing a vigil. Chinese authorities have always been swift to snuff these messages out on social media, triggering a cat-and-mouse dynamic in which digitally savvy people find workarounds to evade the ever-alert censors. Instead of referencing June 4, for instance, they use “May 35” or simply “64.” And the infamous “Tank Man” photo has been doctored again and again, sometimes with rubber duckies replacing the military tanks barrelling toward the slight young man standing resolute before them, grocery bag in hand.
Until recently, it was possible in Hong Kong to talk about the events of that day, to discuss the 1989 democracy movement and to publicly memorialize the dead. But this year, as the New York Times’ Tiffany May put it, “Hong Kong is notable for all the ways it is being made to forget the 1989 massacre.” More than 30 Hong Kongers have been either arrested or detained in recent days for engaging in some kind of public demonstration memorializing the slain students.
This history is now disappearing from Hong Kong’s internet too. Having worked closely with journalists in Hong Kong for a number of years, I knew I wanted to mark the anniversary this week. On Tuesday, I decided to go back and look at Weiboscope, a gripping digital archive of photos, art and messages censored on social media in China for their connection with the 1989 democracy movement. But all I found was a blank page. Weiboscope — a joint project of the University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — still has a domain, but the archive itself is gone. All you can see now is an empty site with the words “Nothing Found” and the standard verbiage for a WordPress site with no content.
This is no accident. The digital records of what people cared about, reported on and knew to be true in Hong Kong have been disappearing from the internet as Beijing has consolidated its power over the city-state. The Weiboscope project fortunately had some redundancy — Citizen Lab hosted some of the material here, and my former team at Global Voices covered the project too. But these sites, too, are blocked in China. And still today, anyone who studies these issues will tell you that most university students in China have never heard about the massacre.
IN GLOBAL NEWS
Access to the internet is being carefully controlled in Senegal, where street demonstrations over a criminal case brought against opposition leader Ousmane Sonko have turned violent in recent days. Sonko was convicted of corrupting a minor and given a two-year prison sentence that could keep him from running for office in the upcoming elections. Protests by his supporters, who believe the case against him was politically motivated, rapidly escalated to violent clashes with the police and have left at least 16 dead. Last week, in an effort to quell the unrest, the Senegalese authorities blocked connections to major social media platforms. By Sunday, mobile internet connections in select areas were being shut down altogether, throughout the afternoon and evening each day. NetBlocks has data confirming what appears to be an internet “curfew” strategy on the part of authorities.