Covid-19 inspired people to circumvent censorship in China

CHINA’S CENSORS are fast. When a mysterious illness struck Wuhan in December 2019, relevant content was swiftly scrubbed from the internet. But Chinese citizens also went looking for forbidden information. A virtual private network (VPN) can mask the location a user is browsing from. That allows Chinese netizens to get around the “great firewall”, the digital barricade the state has built to block sensitive online content. In late January, when Wuhan and surrounding cities locked down, VPN downloads jumped. So did searches for politically sensitive content.

A paper published in PNAS, an academic journal, argues that covid-19 inspired Chinese citizens to circumvent censorship and access sensitive content on banned websites. Although most VPN applications are blocked in China, the researchers found one available on China’s Apple App Store. They noted a sharp increase in downloads of the app, sending its App Store ranking higher, just as Wuhan, and the wider Hubei province of which it is part, went into lockdown (see chart). This, say the authors, opened a gateway to other politically taboo information.