View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective

“Voices of April” (“四月之声”) was posted on the Internet at 20:00 Beijing time on the evening of April 22nd. It is a collection of audio snippets from Shanghai recorded over the course of the lockdown and comes across as fairly balanced, neither cheerleading nor demonizing.

We reported on this here.

By 23:00, it had exceeded nearly 300,000 retweets and had over 30 million views.

At this time the public opinion control system warning was triggered, and manual intervention began. Large numbers of “negative and inflammatory comments” were detected.

The system automatically initiated keyword blocking and bandwidth restrictions. It also shadow-banned the video from interregional rebroadcasting.

The first traffic peak appeared at 23:30, when servers began to detect high levels of person to person forwarding to circumvent the previous measures taken. High traffic (celebrity) channels, video channels and personal a