BEIJING — The most sensitive day of the year for the Chinese interwebs is drawing near, and putting China's robot censors on high alert.<br /><br />June 4, 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, or the bloody massacre that never happened, as far as China is concerned.<br /><br />The Guardian reports that in 1989, government tanks violently cleared student-led protests for democratic reform in a deadly crackdown. No official death toll has ever been released, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. <br /><br />Since then, Beijing has been systematically erasing all evidence and memory of the bloody protests, and blocking any associated content with increasingly hi-tech precision.<br /><br />According to a Reuters report, Chinese censors have reached a new level of accuracy, thanks to machine learning and voice and image recognition.<br /><br />Censorship of the Tiananmen protests and other forbidden topics is largely automated. <br />Posts that include related dates, names, and images are automatically rejected. <br /><br />Reuters reports that the periods leading up to a political event or anniversary, like this one, are especially sensitive. This year, social media censorship has even targeted LGBT groups, NGOs, and labor and environmental activists.<br /><br />Four censors working across Chinese internet companies Beijing Bytedance, Weibo, and Baidu censor 5,000 to 10,000 pieces of information daily, or about five to seven pieces per minute.<br /><br />Companies are responsible for censoring their own platforms. For news, they play it really safe by sticking to a simple rule that it's not authorized if it's not from state media. <br /><br />Otherwise, they run the risk of being punished for failing to properly censor, and hit with days to weeks-long suspensions, which is what happened to the Netease news app, Tencent news app Tian Tian, and Sina Corp over the past six weeks.<br /><br />It's not any better for individual internet users, who can receive penalties about sensitive issues online.
