by JULIE BLUSSE
For almost two months, the FreeWeibo app offered readers an uncensored version of China’s most popular social media network, Sina Weibo. Thanks to a smart technological workaround, developed by Chinese cyber-activists and Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW), government censors had no way to block the app. Except by pressuring Apple to remove it for them. On November 28, Apple complied.
“This is very, very frustrating,” says Charlie Smith, co-founder of FreeWeibo, a collective of activists against internet censorship. The app was the group’s latest attempt to provide Chinese people access to the messages censored on Weibo, without requiring them to use circumvention tools to get over the Great Firewall.
FreeWeibo has been monitoring and documenting Weibo’s censored messages for over a year on FreeWeibo.com. The site is a treasure trove for researchers, journalists and curious citizens who want to find out what Chinese are really discussing online. But unsurprisingly, the site was quickly blocked in China.
The block was no reason for FreeWeibo to give up on its anti-censorship campaign. Together with RNW, which considers the FreeWeibo app a valuable forum for free speech, the activists developed a more censorship-resistant app to publish blocked Weibo tweets.
Surprise attack
The app went live on October 4, and after FreeWeibo successfully fended off a few initial attacks, the censors halted their attempts to frustrate the app’s functioning. FreeWeibo seemed to have exhausted the censors’ methods. The only way that they could block the app was by shutting down China’s access to the App store completely, the activists believed.
But to FreeWeibo’s surprise, the next counterattack didn’t come from the censors. Instead, Apple abruptly brought the cat-and-mouse game between the censors and FreeWeibo to a halt by removing the app from the store.
“We felt quite good about getting around the Chinese censors,” the pseudonymous Smith commented. “So when we found Apple pulled it, that was a real downer. It’s the worst kind of censorship we can face, because there’s not much we can do to counteract it.”
Radio Netherlands Worldwide for more