How digital media blur the border between Australia and China
How much influence is the Chinese government having over Australian digital media? Tom Sear, Michael Jensen and Titus C.Chen investigate in this crossposting from The Conversation.
In September, the ABC website was blocked from being accessed inside China. The reason given was the ABC’s “aggressive” reporting on China. Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded by saying that:
China’s a sovereign country. They make decisions about what happens there, we make decisions about what happens here.
But things are a little more complex than that, particularly when it comes to news published on Chinese social media platforms. Apps like WeChat (known as Weixin 微信 in China) are widely used in Australia by the Chinese diaspora (people of Chinese descent now living in countries other than China).
