Chinese Netizens Arrested For Sharing Coronavirus Memories Online

Chinese Netizens Arrested After Sharing Memories Of COVID-19 On GitHub

CHINESE NETIZENS ARRESTED – China had been known to censor almost anything negative about their country online, especially during the outbreak.

However, even when the coronavirus crisis seemed to have passed, China still continues to censor its residents. Thus, a group of volunteers worked together to preserve digital records of COVID-19 stories.

According to a report from Quartz, the volunteers worked on the software development website, Github. But, Chinese watchdogs still found them and called for their arrest.

Chinese Netizens Arrested For Sharing Coronavirus Memories Online
Image from: UCA News

In lieu of this, two of the participants of the projects, Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man, and his girlfriend were arrested by Beijing police. The couple was charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

As per the report, Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei who is also a member of the project, the charges were commonly used against whistleblowers in China. Following the arrest, Chen Mei went missing.

Later, their family received a letter that stated Chen Mei and his girlfriend were “under residential surveillance at a designated place”. Moreover, there were no further s information about Chen Mei since then.

The project’s name on GitHub was “Terminus2049“, an omage to Isaac Asimov’s series – Foundation. Furthermore, the project on GitHub had been compiling censored news stories from Chinese social media sites since January 2018.

According to the volunteers, the project was meant to empower people to resist “404”. This refers to the error message you see when a web page you want to access had been deleted.

GitHub had been one of the few remaining foreign websites that Chinese netizens could access. However, the authorities have begun stricter crackdowns on the website as many netizens opt to post their stories their instead.

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