WSJ News Exclusive | China Clamps Down on Internet as It Seeks to Stamp Out Covid Protests

The Cyberspace Administration of China issued guidance to companies on Tuesday, including

Tencent Holdings Ltd.

and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese owner of short video apps TikTok and Douyin, asking them to add more staff to internet censorship teams, according to people familiar with the matter. The companies were also asked to pay more attention to content related to the protests, particularly any information being shared about demonstrations at Chinese universities and a fire in the western Xinjiang region that triggered the nationwide backlash over Covid policies.

Rare Protests Explode Across China Over Covid Controls

The directives were issued following an internal meeting at the internet regulator, where officials were also told to ask Chinese search engines, e-commerce companies and internet content platforms to conduct a fresh sweep to remove sales postings and information about how to use virtual private networks, also known as VPNs, according to people familiar with the matter. The regulator also asked officials to get companies to prevent searches related to VPNs, which were used by protesters and their supporters to circulate videos of the recent demonstrations, the people said.

The Cyberspace Administration of China and ByteDance didn’t respond to requests for comment. Tencent declined to comment.

Protesters took to the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities across China over the weekend calling for an end to the country’s zero-tolerance Covid policies, in a rare display of widespread defiance against the government.

In the days since, the government has used a heavy police presence across major cities to keep protesters off the streets, while using cellphone data and social media sites to hunt down and question those who participated in the demonstrations. Protests have been canceled in recent days amid the heavy police presence, and on Thursday, the streets were again quiet with few signs of unrest.

Cities have also begun relaxing some Covid measures. On Thursday, Beijing said it would allow people who test positive to isolate at home as opposed to a government quarantine center. The city has also said it would stop compulsory citywide testing. In the southern city of Guangzhou, where videos had recently shown Covid protests, the city said on Wednesday that it would drop citywide testing and shorten quarantines.

Since the weekend, many Chinese internet companies have taken down videos of the protests. Chinese social-media companies also sought to suppress results for the search term “white paper” after protesters made them a symbol to express their frustration at authorities.

During the protests, a flood of videos, images and other content made its way across the country’s firewall via sites like Twitter that are theoretically restricted in China. VPNs would have made it possible to share information about the protests on restricted sites.

In China, companies are allowed to use licensed VPNs provided mostly by state-run telecom operators to send secure emails and transmit data. Most people have to access external websites using unofficial software, which has been prohibited since 1997. Still, the government doesn’t always police their use and they continue to be widely used by people to bypass the country’s sophisticated system of filters and access websites blocked in China, including Google,

Facebook

and Twitter.

In addition to asking companies to remove sales postings, the Cyberspace Administration of China asked companies to prevent searches using terms that are associated with VPNs, such as “scientific internet surfing,” a phrase coined to evade sensors that is commonly used in China to refer to surfing blocked websites, people familiar with the matter said.

Searches using the terms by a Wall Street Journal reporter on Thursday didn’t return any results on the Twitter-like

Weibo

and on

Alibaba Group Holding

‘s Taobao, a popular e-commerce platform. On Weibo, the search prompted a message: “According to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results have not been displayed.” On Taobao, the message read, “Very sorry. I couldn’t find any related items.” Searches in recent months on Taobao had yielded sales postings for VPNs. Weibo and Alibaba didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

China tends to tighten control over VPN sales and access during times of social disruption, to prevent Chinese abroad from organizing their protests in solidarity and activists in China from seeing that they are getting international support, said Kenton Thibaut, a China fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who studies Chinese online discourse. Both of these things could, in the government’s view, add fuel to the fire and mobilize more protesters, she said.

Some Chinese people have used VPNs to access sites like Twitter and broadcast information about the recent protests. They will often send material via the platform’s messaging system to a handful of widely followed Twitter users. One Twitter account calling itself Li Laoshi, or Teacher Li, with more than 750,000 followers, has been posting dozens of videos of unrest in China since the weekend.

Surfshark, a VPN provider based in Amsterdam, saw a surge in downloads during China’s protests, a company spokeswoman said in an email. The number of troubleshooting requests in China also increased in the same period, as the Chinese government has tried to make it harder for its citizens to use these tools, she said.

On Nov. 28, Twitter was the eighth most downloaded free app on China’s

Apple

App Store, the highest it had ever ranked, according to mobile data analytics firm Sensor Tower. In November, before the weekend protests, Twitter’s ranking had ranged between 104th and 152nd place, Sensor Tower’s data showed.

Rachel Liang contributed to this article.

Write to Liza Lin at [email protected]