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Censorship in China
TechTech Trends

China’s zero-Covid protests: Twitter, Telegram soar in popularity as users circumvent Great Firewall to avoid censorship

  • Twitter and Telegram have become two of China’s most popular free iOS apps in recent days, after people staged protests against Covid-19 controls
  • Photos and videos of such rallies have been circulating on Twitter and Telegram, while those on WeChat and Weibo have been quickly deleted

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Protesters hold up blank papers and chant slogans as they march in protest in Beijing last Sunday. Photo: AP Photo
Coco Fengin Beijing

Twitter and Telegram, which are blocked in mainland China and only accessible via virtual private networks (VPNs), are among the country’s most downloaded apps in recent days amid widespread protests over pandemic restrictions, according to app market researcher Sensor Tower.

Twitter surged to become the eighth most popular free iOS app in China on Monday, two days after such protests broke out across the country starting with Shanghai, data from Sensor Tower showed. While the app had fallen to the 26th place by Thursday, it still ranked far higher than its previous spot of below 100th.

Meanwhile, messaging app Telegram, which allows for encrypted chat, had jumped to the sixth spot on Sunday in the social networking category, where it remained for four days before dropping slightly to seventh place Thursday.

03:59

Protests flare across China over zero-Covid, lockdowns after deadly Urumqi fire

Protests flare across China over zero-Covid, lockdowns after deadly Urumqi fire
Both apps are currently available for download for users with a Chinese Apple ID, but they can only send messages or view content on the apps by using VPN services to circumvent China’s Great Firewall – a sophisticated censorship system that blocks many foreign websites.
In a rare display of open defiance in China, protests spread last weekend across major cities from Beijing to Chengdu, as well as university campuses, as people expressed outrage over a deadly fire in Urumqi, where victims were believed to be blocked from escaping because of Covid-19 restrictions.

Photos and videos of such rallies have been circulating on Twitter and Telegram, while those on WeChat and Weibo, two of the most used social networking platforms in China, have been quickly deleted.

“Using Twitter is very easy as long as you have used Weibo,” one user commented on Apple’s App Store in China on Tuesday, comparing the two microblogging platforms.

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