By Pascal Oparada
The Chinese government has intensified its crackdown on social media users, especially Twitter.
According to a New York Times report, the police in China are hounding, questioning and even detaining people who use the service.
The New York Times reports that China’s Twitter users recount experiences of being detained for hours and sometimes shackled to a chair in a harrowing interrogation.
Human rights activists who use the service report of incessant harassments by the authoritarian regime. Some say they were detained and shown a printout of their tweets and either asked to delete tweets government consider critical of it or its leader, Xi Jin Ping.
Sometimes the authorities would threaten the user’s family and unborn children.
One Activist Huang Chengcheng told The Times that his hands and feet were shackled to a chair during his interrogation before finally signing an agreement to stay off Twitter. The ordeal lasted for eight hours.
Another Twitter user, Pan Xidian posted a dissident cartoonist’s artwork as well as criticisms of the country’s crackdown. Even though he only had 4,000 Twitter followers, he was brought in for questioning in November.
After a 20 hour interrogation, he agreed to delete a number of tweets. Officers later showed up at his place of work even though he had been let go. Police threw the 47-year-old construction employee into a car and ordered him to sign documents claiming he had disturbed the social order and that he was being detained. He was forced to watch propaganda videos during a two-week stint in jail, all for the crime of posting to Twitter.
One young activist provided audio of his four-hour interrogation that stemmed from a tweet about the environment. After warning the Twitter user that everything he does on the internet is being monitored, the officer advised him to stop posting to the network because if he gets caught a second time, it will affect his kids — if he ever has any.
Even though Twitter is banned in the country, Chinese citizens use special software to find their way around.
About 0.4 percent of the 800 million internet users in the country use Twitter. Its Twitter users amount to 2.3 million people and so the possibility of many people seeing tweets by these negligible numbers is slim.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are banned in China. LinkedIn is the only social media allowed in the country but heavily censored.
