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China is in the midst of one of the nastiest social media crackdowns I can recall. Over the past few months 100s - maybe 1000s - have been called in by police for the crime of being on Twitter and expressing opinions about China. nytimes.com/2019/01/10/bus…
Some have been locked up in detention cells for days, one person was questioned for eight hours while shackled in a chair (see photo for one similar to what he was locked up in), another had his family threatened. 
Getting on Twitter and spouting nonsense is something a lot of the world takes for granted. It’s worth remembering for all the hype about China’s tech scene, such freedoms do not exist here. A coordinated police campaign against Twitter users is ongoing.
What’s really wild about this is how the crackdown has pulled in small fries & famous activists alike, how well coordinated it has been, how low the bar has been for Tweets considered problematic, and how it has spanned geographies across China, from Sichuan to Shenzhen to Fujian
In the past such punitive police action for internet behavior/posts has been targeted at individuals or was haphazard. To see it carried out en masse and coordinated feels new. Though it’s reminiscent how Weibo celebrities were brought to heel in 2013. nytimes.com/2013/09/11/wor…
The internet police, a part of China’s Ministry of Public Security, who seem at least partially coordinating this, call local enforcement based on this type of broader internet dragnet “touching the ground.” This summer they got a new leader with a rep for being harsh.
Because police have access to the telcos here, hacking Twitter accounts is easier. A few activists got text messages w/ codes to reset accounts. They were locked out of accounts as tweets were deleted. Some suspect police grabbed the codes from the texts at the telco level.
One factory worker we talked to in Shenzhen was grabbed and questioned for 20 hours on Christmas Day and made to delete Tweets. The police kept one of his phones. When he returned several times to ask for it back, they locked him in a detention cell for ten days.
Another was questioned and made to delete Tweets. A week later police came and pushed him into a car as he was leaving work. He was locked up for fifteen days. Clearly shaken, he told us: “We’re like lambs. They’re taking us one after another. We have no ability to fight back.”
One man with a tiny Twitter following recorded his questioning and gave us a recording. Here’s what the police woman said to him after four hours of interrogation over a tweet complaining about the environment: “Delete all your tweets, and shut down your account.”
“Everything on the internet can be monitored, even the inappropriate comments in WeChat groups.”
”This is truly wholehearted advice, if this happens a second time, it will be handled differently. It will affect your parents. You are still so young. If you get married and have kids, it will affect them.”
