Abstract:
This thesis reports a case study of the censorship on WeChat Public Account Platform to answer the question: How does China’s sophisticated Internet information control programme take its shape on a micro and detectable level where real Internet users are affected? The study first examines state regulations of online content and WeChat rules framed by state guidelines. It then investigates the censorship mechanism practised on WeChat Public Account Platform through an empirical quest and finds that censorship is composed of both pre-publication screening and post-publication user-reporting. The study also utilises FreeWeChat Project, which makes censored content from WeChat Public Account Platform publicly accessible, to collect data for content analysis. The analysis generates findings of the lifespan and violations of these censored posts. Besides, it also discovers two patterns and three themes that are exhibited by the content found in these censored posts. The two patterns – “clickbait titles” and “news compilation” - are the way the content of a post is organised and presented. The three themes – “anti-privatisation”, “pro-liberalisation”, and “political scandal” – are discovered by categorising ideas that have appeared repetitively in the data. Finally, the thesis draws two conclusions. First, the ambiguity residing within the censorship implementation confuses users. And second, information control shapes the ideological environment to which the users of WeChat Public Account are exposed in a way that is conducive to state legitimacy and power.
