Chinese social media platform Weibo announced that it will crack down on the use of homophones and ‘misspelled words’ by netizens in order to create a more “healthy” online environment and stop the spread of “misinformation.”
The announcement became a trending topic on the platform on Wednesday, receiving over 180 million views.
Weibo Administrators posted the announcement on Weibo on July 13, writing:
“In order to create a clear and bright cyberspace, and to maintain a civilized and healthy social ecosystem, we will launch a focused regulation on the illegal behavior of using of homophone characters, variants of words, and other ‘misspelled words’ to spread harmful information. The main details are as follows:
1. We will increase our efforts to inspect and clean up the use of ‘misspelled characters’ to spread harmful information and other violations.
2. We will strengthen the platform’s mechanism of language [wording] supervision, and will refine the keyword identification model.
3. By establishing a positive incentive mechanism, we will reinforce the way to publicize (..) and guide platform users to use standard Chinese characters.
We call on the numerous netizens participating in community discussions here to express their viewpoints in a civilized way and to use standard characters. If you detect content that is in violation of this, we welcome you to report it and we will promptly take care of it.”
Chinese netizens often use Mandarin homophones of censored or sensitive terms in order to avoid detection by Weibo’s censor teams and keyword-matching algorithms so that they can still continue discussions of topics that would otherwise be blocked or taken offline.
The use of homophones on Chinese social media is as old as Chinese social media itself. One of the most well-known examples is the use of the 3-character phrase ‘cao ni ma’ (草泥马), which literally means ‘grass mud horse’, but is pronounced in the same way as the vulgar “f*ck your mother” (which is written with three different characters).
In the earlier years of Chinese social media, the ‘grass mud horse’ became some sort of mythical creature (神兽) that resembled an alpaca. Everyone knew that it was actually a big middle finger to the cyberspace authorities; it was netizens’ way of showing that they could use creative language as a weapon against censorship.
Throughout the years, homophones and other creative use of language have been a recurring tactic to go against censorship of sensitive topics and events.
This week, for example, some Chinese netizens started using the characters for the word ‘Helan’ (荷兰), meaning The Netherlands, which sounds very similar to the province ‘Henan’ (河南) to discuss the Henan bank protests. As reported by Leen Vervaeke in Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, the replacement of the much-censored ‘Henan’ topic by the term ‘Holland’ sparked some affiliated code language, like Zhengzhou becoming ‘Amsterdam’ and bank deposits becoming ‘tulips.’
Although Weibo Administrators make it sound like the crack down on homophones is a new effort, it actually is not. In order to catch up with creative netizens, censors have since long been targeting ‘misspelled’ words and homophones.
Reported by Megan Garber as early as 2014 (quoting research by Jason Q. Ng), there were already 64 different Chinese terms related to ‘Tiananmen’ that were censored on Chinese social media by that time, including the characters ‘陆肆’ (lùsì) and the term ‘liu四’ which both sound like ‘liu si’ (六四), June 4, the day of the Tiananmen student protests of 1989.
“It’s becoming less and less fun around here,” some netizens responded to Weibo’s latest announcement. “What is there left to say? We’d better say nothing at all,” others wrote.
Seven months ago, the platform already announced that Weibo users can no longer have vulgar/slang terms in their usernames, or any other words that are deemed offensive.
Some netizens write that they fear that their “great tradition” of code language, part of China’s online culture and digital heritage, is at risk of dying out after the announced crackdown, but others vow to keep on ‘misspelling’ words: “Just because my educational level is so low and I don’t know all the right characters.”
“We’re just left with doing word puzzles from now on,” another Weibo user writes.
By Manya Koetse
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