Giraffes aren't outright banned on Weibo, but hashtags like #TheGiraffeIncident were blocked when the animals became the center of a wave of discontent.
It's not about censoring language. Or symbols. They are trying to censor ideas. Humans are adaptable.
If you censor the word fuck, then people will start using substitutions, f this f that, and if you censor the substitution, another substitution will pop up
Now I need to know what it is. My first thought would be Spotted Dick, but then Dick is a name. Maybe Pork removeds? That one I can understand being removed.
It's called the "euphemism treadmill". It's why words like "stupid" and "idiot" aren't offensive anymore, they were replaced by "retarded" which is slowly coming back because people are starting to use "autistic" in it's place as an offensive term. Eventually that will also be replaced and "autistic" will be censored.
people are starting to use “autistic” in it’s place as an offensive term.
I must have run in toxic crowds, because "autism" as a derogatory slur was in vogue circa 2005. I never used it, but I had to dismantle a lot of ableism to accept my own diagnosis.
As someone who grew up being called retarded because I was autistic it actually really pisses me off how people get their panties all twisted over the word retard.
I know my experiences aren't universal but I've learned the best way to deal with shit like this is acceptance. "Haha you're retarded!" "Correct." "W-wait what..?"
Investors flooded the giraffe post last weekend with comments complaining about China's slumping stock market, as Bloomberg, CNN, and Reuters reported.
China's blue-chip index, the CSI 300, has been tumbling amid weakening confidence in consumer spending after the country endured a yearslong COVID siege.
Its stock market has lost more than $6 trillion in value since 2021 and continues to slip, despite Beijing intervening nearly a dozen times in January to stall the decline.
Irate commenters were copy-pasting the headline of a state media article, published on the same day as the giraffe post, that said the "entire country is filled with optimism."
Ensuing efforts to censor these references often creates a mental cat-and-mouse that can lead to absurdities like protests with blank sheets of paper or the words "him" and "that man" being banned.
Plain old giraffes haven't been outright banned from Weibo, though some giraffe-related hashtags, like #TheGiraffeIncident, have been blocked, censorship tracking site China Digital Times first reported.
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