Social Media

The events and atmosphere of our topic's time period influenced our topic in history by causing it to be the target of heavy censoring in China. The Chinese government tries to leave no trace of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. They don't teach the events in their history classes or even have it in any textbooks for kids to learn. Because of them not teaching or talking about it, most Chinese college students don't know about the incident. If anyone tries to speak on the matter or pay tribute on social media during the anniversary they are aggressively censored. Anything to do with the event is censored by a firewall. Also, on messaging apps, they restrict users from using terms or numbers with ties to the Tiananmen massacre. These apps also disable lots of other features so users cant get around the various restrictions. For Chinese people to be able to speak their minds without being censored through social media, they had to make a new language to evade the most extensive censorship system in the world. The languages keep progressing as more topics are banned by this system. They also used some software such as Ultrasurf, Psiphon, and Freegate to get past the censorship.