Forget TikTok, it's WeChat that brings China's internet whip to the world
Everything she saw on the Chinese app, WeChat, indicated Donald J.
Trump was an admired leader and impressive businessman. She believed it was the
unquestioned consensus on the newly elected American president. “But then I
started talking to some foreigners about him, non-Chinese,” she said. “I was
totally confused.”
She
began to read more widely, and Ms. Li, who lived in Toronto aat the time,
increasingly found WeChat filled
with gossip, conspiracy theories and outright lies. One article claimed Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada planned to legalize hard drugs. Another rumor
purported that Canada had begun selling marijuana in grocery stores. A post
from a news account in Shanghai warned Chinese people to take care lest they
accidentally bring the drug back from Canada and get arrested.
She
also questioned what was being said about China. When a top
Huawei executive was arrested in Canada in 2018, articles from foreign news
media were quickly censored on WeChat. Her Chinese
friends both inside and outside China began to say that
Canada had no justice, which contradicted her own experience. “All of a sudden
I discovered talking to others about the issue didn’t make sense,” Ms. Li said.
“It felt like if I only watched Chinese media, all of my thoughts would be
different.”
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