A MFSA Member’s Experiences with Online Censorship

A guest post by Lydia Liu

I am a scientist by training, with a Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill, but I found my passion in writing about politics and social and cultural issues. In Spring 2018, I launched a WeChat blog, Moshang USA, which reached more than a quarter-million followers and millions of monthly views in three years. The blog tells the truth of real American life to Chinese immigrants in the USA and worldwide, and to people in China as well. Throughout the life of the blog there was constant censorship, or it could have grown even bigger.

WeChat suspended the Moshang blog one time, and then in September 2021 it hit by a second ban, a seven-month suspension. Imagine you had just gotten tenure at an outstanding university, but the dean suspended you for more than half a year and you were warned not to do frontier research in the future! WeChat was undependable.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to develop YouTube and Twitter as alternatives to make my voice heard. At the time, some of my friends warned me that YouTube would soon be like WeChat in terms of censorship. I laughed at the warnings, believing that there was no way that this could happen to my channel, because I am not radical. I always use mainstream information sources such as reputable media outlets and congressional hearings. I soon had to to reevaluate my assessment.

I happened to make a video translating a presentation by Steve Kirsch (an MIT graduate, though I didn't know that the time) and a Cornell-trained M.D. at a Center for Disease Control (CDC) hearing. (MFSA Newsletter #5, you may recall, reported on Steve Kirsch’s failed attempt to present his work in the auditorium at MIT named after him.) The video was banned on YouTube. In addition, the Moshang YouTube channel was suspended for one week and stripped of monetization for three months.

In December 2021, my channel finally qualified for Ads. Then I was able to see which videos were “yellow-carded”. The result was shocking-- more than 1/3 of my videos were yellow-carded, which brought demonetization and suppressed viewership. Let me give you a couple of examples to better understand how BigTech censorship works.

Video A. Immigrants Self Censor, MIT Students Will Too... (the red arrow below) - This was yellow- carded. The video is about free speech and MFSA.

Video B. Rep. Thomas Massie on Merrick Garland (blue arrow below)- This is a Chinese translation of a congressional hearing about the January 6 protest. It got a yellow card. Out of curiosity, I wondered what kind of "hillbilly" congressman brought me a yellow card. Then I discovered he went to MIT for undergraduate and graduate study.

I did successfully appeal Video A. But why should the yellow card happen in the first place? This video is innocuous. If on a scale from 1 (innocuous) to 10 (controversy), video A is 1 and video B is 10. I would say most of my yellow-carded videos are around 5. Below are more examples of yellow carded videos, if you are interested in exploring it a bit more.

- Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci Clash Translation of a congressional hearing about NIH on GOF study.

- Kenny Xu on Tucker Carlson Show Tucker Carlson interviewed Kenny Xu, the author of a new book - An Inconvenient Minority. Like it or not, Xu's book was once ranked as Amazon's best sellers in two categories: Asian American history & Racism and Discrimination. Tucker Carlson is a mainstream conservative TV host and 40% of his audience are liberals (according to Politico). However, the translation of this interview was still censored by YouTube.

Luckily, it is not a crime yet to be a conservative on YouTube, however, you must stay POOR if you choose to speak for conservative values, especially as a new YouTuber.

Another insane BigTech censorship example can be seen in Moshang’s Twitter impressions (the number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter) on Mar 19th and 20th 2022 compared to exactly one year before. It had twice as many impressions then, when I only had dozens of followers, than now, with close to 1k followers.

Let me provide one more example. I shared a video discussing race on Twitter and pinned it two days before I wrote this. The impressions so far are only 221.

My twitter account was created in Feb 2021. The very first tweet got 710 impressions. Actually, 221 is lower than impressions of every single tweet in my first month. After one year, my twitter is literally worse than a new account.

Wechat's oppression reduced Moshang blog’s readership to 25-40% of its pre-ban level. Well, Twitter and YouTube easily beat it by shadow banning. I believe my experiences are quite common among conservative voices today. It seems conservative = radical in BigTech's playbook. I got it.

I think YouTube does a similar shadow ban too, which certainly contributes to low viewership and slow growth of the channel.

I said I had just one more example, but I can’t help but include the following one. This one example would perfectly educate anyone who has no idea of Wechat's censorship. This is a censored comment for an article about the MFSA’s Change.org petition (as translated below):

The summary of Prof. Dorian Abbot's incident: He was invited by MIT to give a distinguished lecture. Prof. Abbot does not support DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), and published an article about MFE (merit, fairness and equality). He was attacked by twitter mobs, most of whom are MIT students. They asked MIT to cancel Abbot's lecture and succeeded.

This Change.org petition aims at asking MIT for an apology, commitment to free speech on campus, and promising this kind of thing will never happen again.

Reply: We made significant progress in less than 24 hrs, thank you all. Please try to reach 2.2k and we can complete the campaign.

I had no idea why Wechat banned this comment. Eventually I figured out it was most likely due to two words - "Free speech", both in English and in Chinese. "Free speech" in English is not a banned term in the main content of blog posts, but it’s blacklisted in the comment area. WeChat seems to be deferring to the Communist government’s desire to keep its people from thinking about freedom.

Let me conclude all these by the following plea: Dear BigTech in the US, please work even harder to match your pal Wechat in terms of censorship. I have the honor to use both, so a perfectly controlled experiment to study who will be the champion of censorship.