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TAIPEI – Taiwan’s alleged censorship of the World Health Organization (WHO) Facebook page inspired some creative trolls on Thursday, with special characters and foreign scripts used to bypass filters that also censored Winnie the Pooh, a character used to mock Chinese President Xi Jinping. .
The deluge came after Taiwanese politicians and social media users shared screenshots showing messages containing “Taiwan” or “Taiwan can help” and were not uploaded under a banner announcing an event broadcast on I live for the WHO on the coronavirus.
Taiwan has previously accused the world health body of prioritizing policy over health, saying Chinese “obstruction” had prevented it from attending a key meeting focused on the coronavirus.
The autonomous island of 23 million has been remarkably successful in fighting the pandemic, with just seven deaths and fewer than 600 confirmed cases.
But it has been barred from the WHO by Beijing, which regards Taiwan as its own territory and has vowed to take it by force if necessary.
Social media users in Taiwan used additional characters to avoid it and proclaim that “[email protected] it can help ”the world health body fight the virus.
In Hong Kong, also increasingly in the shadow of authoritarian Beijing, others published “Taiwan” in the Vietnamese script that is similar to the Roman alphabet.
Others complained that they could not share the words “Winnie the Pooh,” AA Milne’s self-described “bear with very little brains,” which has been used in the past to poke fun at China’s President Xi Jinping on social media. .
However, the images of the bear leaked through the firewall.
“Acting as authoritarian governments, @WHO is now making active efforts to silence dissent,” tweeted legislator Wang Ting-yu of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said Taiwan had filed a protest with the WHO to express “strong dissatisfaction and regret.”
“Censorship (posts) to such an extent … WHO is corrupt and tries to silence netizens,” said a Taiwanese social media user.
Between 2009 and 2016, Beijing allowed Taiwan to attend the main annual meeting of the WHO as an observer under the name “Chinese Taipei”.
But it has been barred from participating since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who has refused to acknowledge Beijing’s stance that Taiwan is part of “One China.”
Facebook said Thursday that it “took no action against a live broadcast on the World Health Organization’s Facebook page today (including restricting keywords or disabling comments).”
In a statement sent to AFP on Thursday, the WHO said that its social media team had applied filters to its Facebook page “to avoid receiving spam through cyberattacks.”
It has “restored the ability of users to post” the word “Taiwan,” he added.
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