Netizens turn to social media to defy Beijing.

Protesters in China opposing the Xi Jinping regime’s zero-Covid policy are using blocked dating apps and social media platforms to evade censors and share information with each other.
Netizens are saving videos, images
and accounts of protests on platforms abroad before official censors can delete them, according to the Reuters news agency.
Many rely on virtual private networks (VPNs), which are banned, to get past China’s Great Firewall and on to encryptedmessaging apps.
For three days starting Nov25, protesters gathered in several cities across the country in a show of civil disobedience unprecedented since President Xi assumed power a decade ago.
Frustration with the policy had been building, but the spark for the protests was an apartment building fire in Urumqi that claimed 10 lives.
Authorities denied accusations on social media that a lockdown had prevented people from escaping the
blaze. However, that did not stop people in Urumqi from taking
out protests.
Videos of the protests were posted on the apps Weibo and Douyin, and censors tried to scrub them from the platform quickly. But they were downloaded and reposted not only across Chinese social media but also to Twitter and Instagram, which are blocked.
Residents of other cities and students on campuses then organised their own gatherings, which they in turn filmed and posted online.
“People are watching and playing off
each other,” Reuters quoted Kevin Slaten, head of research at China Dissent Monitor, a database run by US-based non-profit Freedom House, as saying.
Protesters communicating via
WeChat, the most popular app in China, keep information to a bare minimum,the Reuters report said. 

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