Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @lizalinwsj and @_KarenHao: "On #China’s heavily censored social media, a new target has emerged for internet police: blank sheets of white paper." wsj.com/articles/new-s…

"Platforms are rushing to remove images of people holding up the empty pages after protesters made them a symbol to express their frustration at China’s zero-Covid policies."

"Across multiple major cities and university campuses, many protesters held up blank pages, causing some online observers to coin it the “white paper revolution.” A Chinese stationery company issued a denial after rumors spread that it would suspend the sale of such paper."

"Online, users of the ubiquitous social-media platform WeChat and Twitter-like Weibo posted digital white rectangles with the words “I love you, China. I love you, young people”—...

... a symbol of solidarity and defiance that nodded to the shrinking public space for disagreement with authority."

"Even as the censors raced to pull down videos of the countrywide protests off several social-media platforms, the speed and frequency of the protests occurring over the weekend made it difficult for censors to handle the volume of content uploaded online."

"Searches for the term “white paper” on WeChat and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, return videos of origami and art, instead of videos of Chinese protesters carrying blank sheets of paper. Weibo had been scrubbed clean of videos of such protests.

A search for the term Wulumuqi Zhong Road in Shanghai, where some of the most fiery protests took place Sunday, found many of the posts still searchable were from official accounts run by state or party-linked media or government agencies."

"The Wall Street Journal found one post on Monday afternoon that had been online for an hour that had evaded the censors: a user in Zhejiang had posted a photo of a box of A4 white printing paper, ...

... referring to a measurement of paper size commonly used outside the U.S., along with the caption: “I heard this item was recently sold out. #A4 #white paper #coronavirus #freedom.”"

Within a few hours, the post had been removed.

"At Beijing’s Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious universities, students began using blank pages as protest in defiance of a new university policy barring the printing of unverified content at university printing facilities, ...

... according to a letter alumni wrote to the university administration in support of the campus demonstrations."

“We believe the opposition of our classmates is completely justified,” the letter said, bearing over 400 signatures. “Healthy public dialogue requires freedom of expression.”

"Many Chinese internet users who couldn’t post protest content within China chose to turn to overseas platforms such as Twitter to do so, resulting in dozens of these videos being circulated outside of the country."

@EricLiu_USA an analyst with the censorship-focused news website China Digital Times and who had worked as a censor at Weibo between 2011 and 2013, said he had seen much more engagement with his Twitter posts, written in Chinese, on the protests this weekend than before.