On Wednesday, 27 November, the blue tick verified ‘Teacher Li is not Your Teacher’ (李老师不是你老师) X (formally Twitter) account posted to its 1.8 million followers that it believes it had been shadow banned on the platform. The post speculated that the ban was in relation to the two-year anniversary of the White Paper Movement, a protest wave that rocked through numerous cities in China in November 2022 and saw numerous anniversary protests around the world over the past weekend. ARTICLE 19 calls on X to immediately end the shadow ban and provide detailed explanation as to what steps it is taking to push back against requests for censorship from authoritarian governments like China.
Shadow banning occurs when a social media platform intentionally limits the reach of certain content to its users, although platforms often deny shadow banning takes place. In its post, the Teacher Li account shared a screenshot from the platform claiming it had been subjected to a ‘search suggestion ban’.
On 28 November, ARTICLE 19 ran its own search on X, using the account’s username @whyyoutouzhele and its Chinese account name 李老师不是你老师. The search did not surface the authentic Teacher Li account in either case, however both searches revealed multiple impersonator accounts, with around 20 when searching for the username. The search for the Chinese account name returned over 900 impersonator account results, but not the authentic account.
Michael Caster, ARTICLE 19’s Head of Global China Programme, said:
“In China’s relentless war on the free flow of information, both within the walled garden of the Great Firewall and increasingly around the world through the complicity of the global tech sector, few influencers have had as much positive impact as the Teacher Li account. In widely disseminating information to its ever-growing number of followers, the account has become a chronicle of details on protest, crackdown, and wider human rights abuses in China, which terrifies the Party. This appears to be the latest incident in a long line of digital transnational repression targeting the account and its operators.”
“Time and again we have seen China pursue extreme measures in its global censorship objectives. Sadly, we have also often seen global tech companies bow to this pressure. It seems to have happened again, with little other explanation than X caving to pressure from China to interfere with the freedom of expression and free flow of information affecting the account’s more than 1.8 million followers. It is shameful.”
Few online actors are more influential in skirting China’s censorship efforts than Li Ying (李颖) who established the @whyyoutouzhele, ‘Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher’, account in April 2022. Having lived in Italy since 2015, he used to post actively on the Chinese platform Weibo. Because he lived beyond the Great Firewall, people in China would reach out asking him to post sensitive content on their behalf. His Weibo account was shut down at least 52 times for crossing the line into social issues, until he was finally purged from the platform altogether. In April 2022 he switched to X and by November 2022 was gaining hundreds of thousands of followers a week, as he became a clearinghouse for sensitive content, especially for information about the White Paper Protests. As the account became a respected source for disseminating and accessing sensitive information beyond the reach of China’s censors, Li Ying faced increasing digital transnational repression.
On 28 November 2022, Li’s personal information was doxed for the first time, including his home address in Italy and pictures of his passport. Some of the anonymous X accounts involved in the doxing also sent him death threats. Safeguard Defenders reported that on the same day Chinese Ministry of State Security officials visited his parents in Li’s hometown. They continued to do so for a couple of weeks, questioning them over Li’s whereabouts and falsely accusing him of receiving foreign funding to engage in anti-China behaviour. Authorities even threatened to block his parents’ pensions if he refused to delete his social media account.
On 12 April 2023, Li found out that all his Chinese bank accounts had been frozen. His parents also told him that surveillance cameras had been installed outside of their home, and that they were subjected to increased scrutiny. Threats online in March and April of 2024 continued to go after his parents if he didn’t return from overseas.
In February 2024, Li posted on X that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) was investigating the identities of his China-based followers and anyone who had responded in the comments. Those who were identified were being ‘invited for tea’, a euphemism in China for being summoned and interrogated. He wrote that anyone who felt scared should unfollow him. CNN reported at the time that within a few days he had lost some 200,000 followers, likely the silencing effect the MPS was hoping for. ARTICLE 19 denounced this escalation in harassment and censorship at the time.
“X must immediately end this arbitrary shadow ban targeting such a leading independent voice in the overseas Chinese human rights movement and explain with full transparency exactly how this happened. If it came about as the result of pressure from China, the company must reveal all communications and the channels through which China acted to influence X. The company should also explain what efforts it is taking to prevent this kind of overt influence from succeeding in the future. It also needs to address the avalanche of clearly coordinated inauthentic accounts that have proliferated on its platform to sew confusion and silence the authentic accounts of human rights defenders like Teacher Li.”
For more information
Michael Caster, Head of Global China Programme, [email protected]g.