(THREAD) As someone who follows C-ent and is active in Chinese online fandom, I'd also like to add that even before the censorship apparatus kicks in, there's a lot of self-censorship that people engage in because the online Chinese social media environment itself is https://twitter.com/InitialVW/status/1304472575712559105

set up to be very skewed and curated. When I first started hanging around on weibo 2 years ago, one of the things that boggled me most, (and actually, still boggles my mind as being a thing) is the existence of something called "Sunshine Credit". It's essentially a ranking

system for how "good" a user you are. And the better your sunshine credit, the better your experience on the site, which includes having your comments showing up higher on threads, better likelihood of winning online draws

etc. etc. Weibo literally has a whole page under your account settings detailing sunshine credit which I won't bother to translate, but in short, your sunshine credit drops if you act bot like (so reposting content w/o commenting, or if other users fast repost your content

w/o engaging, or you're often sharing posts that "perpetuate negativity", or "sensitive words" are used often in weibo group chats you frequent. These sensitive words are mainly to do with money and finance, so to deter from online financial fraud I guess? But every time you use

words like 买票 (buy ticket) 支付宝 (alipay), 付钱 etc. a warning notice will pop up in the group chat & literally everyone else in the chat will be on alert and kind of call you out on it (not maliciously but just kind of like, hey, you said a trigger word just

now, be careful next time) because not only does it effect your sunshine credit, every time you mess up, it effects the sunshine credit of everyone else in that group chat too. It's such a thing that in many of the weibo chat groups I'm, in part of the group chat rules is to

memorize the "sensitive words" to make sure you don't accidentally trigger any of them. So what do you do if you have shitty sunshine credit and want to increase it? You can do that by having more comment engagement in your posts, or reposting "positivity posts", which yep,

include posts that praise the state, or the nation. Also, another thing that really strikes me is the practice of collective memory and mourning on "public" online spaces. On big days of national mourning/remembrance (eg: the July 7th Lugou bridge incident) users on weibo are

expected to only be somber, jovial expression is frowned upon. WeChat comparatively is a less "public" platform than Weibo (it's a messaging app first and foremost) so your experience isn't curated to the same extent it is on Weibo, but still the self-censorship is prevalent

I'm in a couple of fanchat groups on WeChat, and every year on June 4th, many of my chat groups will put out notices reminding group members to be cautious/careful with their words. There is no explicit explanation for why, but everyone knows what the implicit reason is.

& even tho there aren't explicit sensitive words laid out like on Weibo, again, there are terms that everyone knows you just don't use or avoid. I still rmbr that one time, I had just started joining these chats and so was very naive to all these subtleties, at one pt I was

asking some questions related to govn't/politics as it relates to c-ent & i just about gave half the people in that group chat (a chat of 200+ ppl) a heart attack because I'd used the terms 共产党 & 政府 w/o any type of censorship to it. I was, without realizing it, potentially

endangering the chat w/ shut down, and along w/ it, the banning potentially of all 200+ Wechat accts in that group chat. That didn't actually happen ofc, cuz we weren't talking about anything subversive at all, but what really stuck with me was just how triggered and on alert

everyone in that chat group was. And again, these aren't particularly politically inclined people or anything, it's literally just a chat group of 200+ fangirls, everyday Chinese citizens, but the fact that this self-awareness and caution is so engrained and conditioned

was eye opening. Moving forward I picked up on how in general, sensitive terms, are substituted either by pinyin shorthand (eg: zf for 政府 "govn't", gmd for 国民党 “KMT". but actually, gmd itself is sensitive precisely because, if you input that into the pinyin keyboard

the first suggestion that pops up is 国民党) homophones, (eg: 郭嘉/郭佳 for 国家 "country") or emoji (eg: 开车 is internet slang for rated 18+ content, so 18+ content is often indicated by using a) They call this "neutralizing" communication.

Because I frequent these spaces, I follow these communication rules as a general rule of thumb now as well, but it's an active process that I notice myself consciously participating in every time I log on to WeChat & Weibo. But for all these other regular folks, it's automatic

almost like second nature, and I always can't help but wonder what kind of psychological impacts of implications this has. All this to say, Chinese rarely ever share views and opinions, especially ones deemed potentially controversial, in spaces beyond trusted private ones

because almost every online medium is still a performance to some extent. So while ofc Chinese political sentiments run the full spectrum, rarely will those on the outside ever see, esp. online, because of a mixture of state censorship + conditioned self censorship. /END.