A 4 word made 23,000 videos disappear: after four bridges, China reviewed the beginning of a search for digital code

A video of a tremor that used to play a foreign network jam, because the comment section had a “one of the four that was not said”, suddenly hit the most sensitive memory of Chinese political censorship.

On 5 October, a shivering owner uploaded “68 and its two elf neighbours”, marked 67, 68 and 69 respectively. The video was quickly received about 23,000 hits and 24,000 copies. It is not the video itself that really changes its fate, but the comment area. Some wrote, “There is actually one with four left unsaid”, and received 1,670 praises; Beijing IP users responded immediately: “Don't fuck us with no vibrating.”

Shortly thereafter, the comment area was not properly displayed. The publisher left his own message: "Come back for dinner and see who's done my comment section." “Account X, “Señor Li is not your teacher”, then stated that the video and account numbers were not available.

The real sensitivity is not 67, but the network member himself has added 4

“67” is a non-material web-link that is popular on short-visual platforms in Europe and America, and there is a lot of explanation and imitation on Chinese jives. The political nature of the incident did not come from 67 per cent, but from Chinese netizens recoded the numbers.

The comment, “4”, was interpreted by some netizens as a four-bridge Beijing bridge. On 13 October 2022, on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Chinese Congress, Peng Li-fa, on the Beijing Bridge, displayed banners such as “No nucleic acid for food, no seal for freedom, no vote for the leader”, and called “Sentor strike to remove the dictator Xi Jinping”. After the incident, the names, locations, pictures and slogans disappeared from the Chinese Internet.

No one needs to write the words “Pompon Li-fa” this time, and no one even has to write “four bridges”. A “4” plus the common context of the comment area would be sufficient to allow those familiar with the political exclusion zone to understand each other.

Reviewing the machine is no longer a word, but a context

The logic of traditional sensitive word reviews is to match: six four, Xi Jinping, four bridges, Peng Lifa. The Internet users keep matching with the tune, numbers, abbreviations, expressions and miswords.

This game of mice drives the review to a deeper level: the platform needs to not only recognize what “you wrote”, but also to judge what “you are implying”.

There is no publicly available notice of Platform penalties indicating why the video could not be displayed and therefore it cannot be written into publicly confirmed penalties. But the part of the event that is truly worth reporting does not depend on the announcement that a general digital comment has immediately made a large number of Chinese users aware of the political risks and has taken the initiative to warn “don't make us look unmistakable”.

It's a much deeper control than the deletion. Power does not even need to be interpreted in person every time, and long-term scrutiny has trained users to avoid themselves.

Four bridges were removed and not really disappeared

Xi Jinping's regime can put the word “Ten Bridges” on the platform in jeopardy, but it cannot eliminate its function of descriptor in social memory. A place could then become a number, a slogan could become a joke, and a protest that was forbidden to discuss could be sent to a short video that had nothing to do with politics.

This is the paradox of China ' s censorship system: the more absolute the ban is, the more developed the code is; Political expression is driven out of normal languages and then goes into numbers, metaphors and group concoctions.

Four years later, the phrase “one more with four left unsaid” still allows the comment area to read the risks quickly. This is not a success of the review for Xi's system of information control, but rather a more difficult fact — the political memory that has been removed is seeking to continue to exist in new languages.