The case is triggered by the complaint of a writer, identified with the pseudonym Mitu, who suddenly saw herself deny access to his draft novel for alleged illegal content. Her story, which became trending on the popular Chinese social network Weibowas shared on several discussion forums, where other episodes of censorship and blocking of various users who used the same WPS software emerged.
A reality that highlights a pervasive social control enforced by the authorities in China and the compromises to which the country’s tech companies must submit to the detriment of people’s freedom and privacy. The Wps platform, created by Kingsoft, a company specializing in software development, is available on the cloud and has over 310 million monthly users. Its success is also due to special legislation that in China favors national companies with subsidies and public contracts to the detriment of foreign ones, motivated by security reasons. Like Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, WPS allows you to work and write to files stored on corporate servers or, locally, through desktop programs.
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Big tech spies on behalf of the government
However, the user’s documents are subject to review – therefore accessible to third parties and not protected by encryption protocols – by the software managers.
WPS managers admitted this in a post published on Weibo to respond to growing criticism, claiming to be obliged to check the contents in accordance with the restrictive measures on the Internet and cybersecurity, envisaged by the Chinese authorities. The writer Mitu, for her part, has announced that the software has inhibited access to her text of 1.3 million characters, drafts of a novel, already shared with a publisher in 2021, both on the cloud and on the desktop application. Wps, once received the report, unlocked the document apologizing to the author. Despite this, the company could not avoid a drastic drop in trust and stop users’ online protests. Which echoed Mitu’s complaint, bringing to light many other cases of blocked accounts on social media. The head The Economic Observerfor example, he told the story of Liu Hui, a writer from the city of Canton, who was denied access to a file of over 10 thousand characters at the beginning of July.
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Preventive Chinese state censorship
This WPS practice, found in the many cases reported on news sites, highlights a serious phenomenon of preventive state censorship in China. Online document sharing platforms are increasingly popular and used by Chinese users. But usually censorship, a practice well known to users, comes into action after the texts are published and displayed. Sometimes, they are the same authors as the artist Jianguo Xiongdi, to call internet users to help to make a text, thanks to a participatory editing activity, acceptable to the standards prescribed by Chinese law.
With the Mitu case, however, users have discovered that even documents and works, in circulation only privately, are not protected by the surveillance and monitoring system by the country’s authorities.
The trend is that to strengthening of the state censorship apparatus. Which expands its intervention and its grip on cyberspace more and more even in the preventive phase. As evidence, the June decision of the State Internet Regulatory, Censorship, Supervision and Control Agency of require online platforms to pre-examine all comments prior to their publication.
The pressure on platforms and tech companies, which are asked at the same time not to abuse user data, is increasing sharply and hashtags, posts and information are surgically removed on social networks that can damage or put in a bad light government and representatives of the local power. On platforms such as WeChat, criticism of the prolonged lockdown due to the pandemic, applied in the city of Shanghai, has been eliminated in recent months. While posts on Weibo and WeChat documenting the theft of personal data of 1 billion Chinese users from the Shanghai police database have been deleted, they have revealed the flaws and gaps in the management of cyber security despite the measures heralded by the central authorities .
Therefore, by extending the range of action of the Chinese censorship machine immeasurably, neither the freedom of expression nor the privacy of the individual is spared.