Tag Archives: Twitter

Football

China’s Censored Crowd Close-ups Spark World Cup Outrage

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China’s national broadcaster CCTV censored close-ups of crowd shots throughout the World Cup in Qatar – but how did they it, why were they doing it, and what does it all mean?

A funny thing happened shortly after the start of the FIFA World Cup. I was browsing WeChat, the ubiquitous social media platform in China which combines Facebook-style posts with WhatsApp-style messaging (plus a whole lot more), and I came across this video post below:

What it showed was footage from parallel broadcasts of the Australia vs Tunisia World Cup game on November 26, 2022, with the international feed (complete with BBC graphics) at the top and China’s state-run channel CCTV’s version at the bottom. They were exactly the same, but with one crucial difference: whenever the BBC version went to close-up shots of the crowd, the CCTV version showed close-ups of the two coaches on the sidelines instead.

The general commentary online had made the connection with China’s COVID policy at the time and the World Cup in Qatar, ostensibly asking the question “Why is it that thousands of people can congregate at the World Cup without wearing masks whereas we here in China are largely confined to our homes?”

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Golf

Shock horror: PGA caddies, players CAN access Twitter in China!

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Many of the world’s top golfers are in Shanghai right now for the HSBC Champions – an official event of both the European and PGA Tours – so the world’s golfing media are paying attention. And golfers like to tweet: Jason Dufner starting the whole #dufnering meme earlier this year, Ian Poulter likes to talk about his car collection, Rory McIlroy writes messages to his (possibly now ex-) girlfriend tennis star Caroline Wozniacki, Tiger Woods announced he was seeing Lindsay Vonn on social media and so on.

But China, as we know, has these rules about silly matters like Facebook and Twitter. It is also, as we know, not exactly hard to bypass those rules using a VPN. But apparently that is still news to many in the west, judging by this article from Golf Digest, titled “PGA Tour golfer D.A. Points and caddie Kip Henley are defying the Chinese government”.

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