It Only Takes Three People to Create a Tiger

China and Censorship in the Age of COVID-19

Art by James Ferguson. Image Caption: The bottom half of a person’s face in black and white. Their mouth is covered by a depiction of a Chinese flag in bright red and yellow.

Online activism has radically changed the way human rights violations are documented, especially in environments where records of abuse are difficult to obtain. The capacity to mass share content, multiplied by the ability to restart entire communities quickly even after being shut down, has allowed civic journalism to thrive and continue to grow despite censorship efforts. As Amnesty International explains, “combined with powerful tools such as Google Earth, investigators now have hundreds of potential crime scenes at their fingertips.” At the same time, it’s important to note that the increased level of connectivity online has also given governments more tools to track down protestors and crackdown on dissent. The internet is in a constant arms race to bring freedom to the oppressed and to censor the efforts to do so. As David Kaye, the United Nations special reporter on freedom of expression and opinion confirmed, “anonymity is essential to the exercise of free expression online” (Solomon). In countries such as China, it is vital to continue to support citizen reporting of human rights violations, especially in moments of crisis such as the novel coronavirus pandemic. Although civic online engagement is not the only way to obtain data on major public issues, it is a good way to gauge the…