As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
www.nytimes.com
The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.

Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

Non-paywall link

  • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Were those links killed because of archieving or website changes? Cause ive encountered that in the past with random shit, using links on the nexus mod pages for example has a pretty good chance to be a dead link since nexus migrated their site some years ago. I can easily see a scenario where ya may kill certain pages and transfer the story to an archieve instead, especially if the title may be reused or something similar. “3 killed in fatal car crash on the 15” aint exactly a unique headline for example.