Giraffes appear to be on a path to joining the ranks of Winnie the Pooh and Peppa Pig on Beijing's internet watchlist

ooli@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 156 points –
Giraffes appear to be on a path to joining the ranks of Winnie the Pooh and Peppa Pig on Beijing's internet watchlist
businessinsider.com
23

It's not about censoring language. Or symbols. They are trying to censor ideas. Humans are adaptable.

If you censor the word fuck, then people will start using substitutions, f this f that, and if you censor the substitution, another substitution will pop up

Try telling that to the Lemmy.World admins who auto-censor removed. :/

It's a fucking British food you bastards! I will die on this hill! Free the removed!

Now I need to know what it is. My first thought would be Spotted Dick, but then Dick is a name. Maybe Pork removeds? That one I can understand being removed.

I think I know what it is. You can buy them in the supermarket. It’s slang for a gay man, rhymes with maggot.

Ah yes, I understand why they remove it as I don't think it's often used in its other contexts. I do prefer to use it to describe a bundle of sticks

Ah so similiar to the german translation of the instrument bassoon?

And Norwegian. It's hard to converse with countrymen on a platform running word filters for another language.

Not just playing the instrument "removed", but discussing school classes with friends and family as we would say "hvilke fag tar du i år?" to ask which classes you take this year. Luckily Lemmyworld isn't that aggressive, but many online chat services and emails clients have started screaming at "fag".

Encountering such filters on a school computer that blocked my emails was particularly frustrating.

Someone has a word that shares the f-slur for a benign food product? Holy shit that's unfortunate.

My dad used to talk about them. He'd call it faggots and peas.

Why the fuck is this showing up as "Pork removeds" for me?

I feel like that guy on Reddit who accidentally set his device's language to Spanish and asked for help in Reddit, and everyone pranked him by writing their comments in Spanish

It's called the "euphemism treadmill". It's why words like "stupid" and "idiot" aren't offensive anymore, they were replaced by "retarded" which is slowly coming back because people are starting to use "autistic" in it's place as an offensive term. Eventually that will also be replaced and "autistic" will be censored.

people are starting to use “autistic” in it’s place as an offensive term.

I must have run in toxic crowds, because "autism" as a derogatory slur was in vogue circa 2005. I never used it, but I had to dismantle a lot of ableism to accept my own diagnosis.

As someone who grew up being called retarded because I was autistic it actually really pisses me off how people get their panties all twisted over the word retard.

I know my experiences aren't universal but I've learned the best way to deal with shit like this is acceptance. "Haha you're retarded!" "Correct." "W-wait what..?"

"The US government, please help Chinese stock investors," said another, per CNN on Monday.

That's certainly an... ambitious request. I'm sure the US government will get right on that.

Plain old giraffes haven't been outright banned from Weibo

Flamboyant young ones, on the other hand..

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Investors flooded the giraffe post last weekend with comments complaining about China's slumping stock market, as Bloomberg, CNN, and Reuters reported.

China's blue-chip index, the CSI 300, has been tumbling amid weakening confidence in consumer spending after the country endured a yearslong COVID siege.

Its stock market has lost more than $6 trillion in value since 2021 and continues to slip, despite Beijing intervening nearly a dozen times in January to stall the decline.

Irate commenters were copy-pasting the headline of a state media article, published on the same day as the giraffe post, that said the "entire country is filled with optimism."

Ensuing efforts to censor these references often creates a mental cat-and-mouse that can lead to absurdities like protests with blank sheets of paper or the words "him" and "that man" being banned.

Plain old giraffes haven't been outright banned from Weibo, though some giraffe-related hashtags, like #TheGiraffeIncident, have been blocked, censorship tracking site China Digital Times first reported.


The original article contains 538 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!