China Digital Times

CDT presents a monthly series of censored content that has been added to our “404 Deleted Content Archive.” Each month, we publish a summary of content blocked or deleted (often yielding the message “404: content not found”) from Chinese platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (TikTok’s counterpart in the Chinese market), Xiaohongshu (RedNote), Bilibili, Zhihu, […]

The post below, from WeChat account 白桦视界 Báihuà Shìjiè, or “White Birch Vision,” is a censored response to new restrictions on drone ownership and storage within the city of Beijing. Registration requirements and flight restrictions were already in place; the new, tighter measures followed the crash in late June of a manned aircraft into Beijing’s […]

In mid-September, a man was arrested for stabbing and wounding an unknown number of women outside a hotpot restaurant in the GOGO Xintiandi shopping plaza in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. The man appeared to target only women, and images and footage posted online (much of it later deleted) showed police officers rushing into […]

Sophia Huang Xueqin, a journalist whose reporting on human rights and sexual abuse helped to galvanize China’s #MeToo movement, was scheduled to be released from prison last Friday, after completing a five-year sentence for allegedly “inciting subversion of state power.” Huang and her friend, labor activist Wang Jianbing, were detained in Guangzhou in September of […]

The following is an introduction to and contextualization of some of the specific entries and broader categories included in CDT’s archived “ByteDance Lexicon of Sensitive Terms.” The lexicon, which contains some 5,241 “sensitive” words and phrases subject to review by ByteDance internal content moderators, derives from a larger tranche of internal content-review documents that date […]