By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch Managing Editor

BEIJING, China – As Hong Kong’s youth take to the stress to defy Beijing’s attempts to reign in the former British Colony the Chinese government has been actively attempting to silence the demonstrator’s online social media presence. In the wake of Hong Kong’s Umbrella revolution the People’s Republic of China has ramped up censorship of social media and news websites inside of the China preventing real-time coverage of the events unfolding on the streets of Hong Kong. Like many modern democratic movements online social media has played an important role in the Hong Kong demonstrations as young people take to the streets armed with umbrellas to protect themselves from teargas and smart-phones to share their stories with the world. However, the majority of people living in mainland china will not have access to the posts of their countrymen.

Chinese state-run news outlets not covered pro-democracy demonstration except to call the demonstrators extremists. A story from the state-run news outlet Xinhua featured the Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung denounced the demonstrations as “unlawful.” The Chinese government has been actively working to ensure that the protests are not only kept in the dark by state-run media but by social media platforms as well.

The Chinese government has been using its online censorship program to scrub Chinese social media of pro-democracy posts from Hong Kong, especially on Weibo, china’s version of Twitter and one of the largest social media platforms in the world. The government, which has extensive control over Weibo posts, has removed posts containing key-words indicating a relationship to the Hong Kong demonstrations including pro-democracy phrases.

Photos of the protests and clashes between police and demonstrators have flooded the internet over the past two days. The flood of posts has come in at a faster rate than the Chinese can apparently handle and in response popular photo sharing websites like Instagram have been blocked in the country. “In the past two days, we can see a lot of people holding phones and taking pictures of different (Hong Kong protest) scenes on Instagram, Facebook and sharing it around,” King-wa Fu, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, said. China observers  have noted that while the app can’t be accessed in China for most citizens, the country’s First Lady Peng Liyuan’s official Instagram account posted a picture of her and her husband, China’s President Xi Jinping, on Monday.

Twenty five years ago Chinese youths took to the streets in Beijing to demand a movement towards democratization. Much like today the Chinese government actively worked to keep the majority of the Chinese populous in the dark by stomping stories of the Tiananmen Square protests and the government massacre that silenced them. It remains unclear what the future will bring for the Umbrella Revolution and the people of china but what is clear is that the proliferation of social media and internet access around china and the world has made it nearly impossible for the Chinese government to stop the signals coming out of Hong Kong and to keep its people in the dark.

For more information please see:

The Economist – HK Backspace, Backspace – 4 October 2014

CNN International – China’s Internet Firewall Censors Hong Kong Protest News – 30 September 2014

The New York Times – Chinese Web Censors Struggle with Hong Kong – 30 September 2014

Foreign Policy – In China, the Most Censored Day of the Year – 29 September 2014