New Era

China blocks LGBTQ rights group on app

- -Nampa/AFP

BEIJING - Multiple social media accounts belonging to major university LGBTQ rights groups in China have been blocked from the popular WeChat app, prompting fears of targeted censorship and calls Wednesday for an online protest.

The WeChat pages of groups, including Huazhong University of Science and Technology Gay Pride and Peking University’s ColorsWorl­d, had their past posts scrubbed and replaced with a notice stating: “all content has been blocked and the use of the account has been stopped” for violations of unspecifie­d social media regulation­s.

The brief notices said WeChat had received “complaints” about the pages, while the groups’ account names had been changed to “Unnamed Account” on Tuesday, based on publicly visible account records.

Super-app WeChat is China’s biggest social media platform, with instant messaging, blogs and other content, as well as the ability to make payments.

Chinese social media firms frequently censor content deemed to be politicall­y sensitive or inappropri­ate, with censors previously targeting LGBTQ-related content on video streaming apps and foreign films.

Zhihe Society, a feminist student group at Shanghai’s Fudan University focusing on sexual minorities, confirmed its WeChat official account had been permanentl­y deleted in a statement on another social media platform on Wednesday.

“It’s very clear that there’s no possibilit­y that Zhihe’s original account can be revived in the short term,” the organisati­on said in a statement on the Twitter-like Weibo platform, without giving details of the reason for the takedown.

Although China decriminal­ised homosexual­ity in 1997, same-sex marriage is illegal and issues around LGBTQ groups are often considered politicall­y sensitive.

Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not respond to AFP’s query on what prompted the account removals.

Multiple WeChat users not affected by the block circulated lists of deleted accounts and called Wednesday for a digital protest against the deletions, asking readers to change their profile names to “Unnamed account”insupporto­fthegroups. Many of these posts were deleted shortly after.

While no government body has claimed responsibi­lity for the deletions, activists fear the seemingly coordinate­d actions could be motivated by an antiLGBTQ agenda.

Sun Wenlin, co-founder of the China Marriage Equality Advocacy Network, told AFP that the way the accounts were blocked in one go suggested to him that “someone at a government department may have written an internal report for higher-ups” that included a list of LGBTQ social media groups.

A member of a small LGBTQ non-government­al organisati­on who asked to remain anonymous told AFP that representa­tives from the student groups had been “invited for tea on a large scale in the past two months,” using a term for meetings with the authoritie­s intended to intimidate potentiall­y subversive individual­s.

A student member from one of the affected groups who also asked not to be named told AFP that because

of the increasing pressure on the LGBTQ community in China, the shutdowns were “not totally unexpected”.

“I’m still really angry about it,” he said. Attitudes toward alternativ­e lifestyles are slowly softening in socially conservati­ve China, although an official push towards traditiona­l gender roles has come down harshly on men deemed “effeminate” or women who reject motherhood.

Users on the Weibo social media platform were divided on the topic, with some praising the account removals and using homophobic language to criticise the student groups.

Others mourned the loss of the accounts, with one user asking: “Could it be that this country and this society can’t even tolerate a rainbow flag?”

 ?? Photo: bangkokpos­t.com ?? Blocked… Multiple social media accounts belonging to major university LGBTQ rights groups in China have been blocked from the popular WeChat app, prompting fears of targeted censorship.
Photo: bangkokpos­t.com Blocked… Multiple social media accounts belonging to major university LGBTQ rights groups in China have been blocked from the popular WeChat app, prompting fears of targeted censorship.

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