Holes in the firewall

Hello! It’s Drake here in New York. Today we’re going to look at the digital Covid protest movement in China. But first...Today’s must-reads [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hello! It’s Drake here in New York. Today we’re going to look at the digital Covid protest movement in China. But first... Today’s must-reads: • Salesforce backtracks on WFH as [growth slows]( • Apple is ramping up its work on an [AR/VR headset]( • HPE has expressed interest in buying cloud company [Nutanix](. Censoring the censors The public displays of discontent that have erupted in the past week across China in response to the government’s strict zero-Covid policies have been unprecedented in the country’s recent history. Nationwide demonstrations of any size have been all but unheard of since Tiananmen Square in 1989. Almost as striking as the bravery of the people taking to the streets, though, has been the way digital protesters have been able to frustrate the censors who man the country’s Great Firewall, opening small windows allowing information and images of the protests to spread. As Bloomberg and others have reported, it’s taken a mix of guile and numbers. Chinese internet censors, like the modern anti-knowledge workers they are, are humans assisted by artificial intelligence. Posters to Chinese social networks have [exploited](the fact that algorithms that have no trouble identifying individual viral videos to take offline seem to have more trouble when lots of people upload videos of the same protest shot from different angles—especially when those people then flip the videos on their side or put them through filters. AI also has trouble with sarcasm (human censors aren’t always great with it, either), and so messaging apps like WeChat and Weibo have seen a proliferation of users posting, as [Bloomberg reported](, “a single, seemingly innocuous word, repeated many times, including ‘good,’ ‘okay,’ or ‘sure,’ as a sarcastic expression of discontent." Others posted images of blank white sheets of paper to protest the threat of censorship itself. These memes manifested in real life as well, as protesters held up pieces of paper with the red exclamation mark that on the Chinese internet denotes censored content. In a particularly abstruse touch, some students at the elite Tsinghua University “held up pieces of paper bearing the Friedmann Equations, cosmological expressions that measure the rate of expansion of the universe -- a veiled reference to the inevitability of opening up,” my colleagues in Asia reported. These methods aren’t totally new—when smaller protests broke out earlier this year over Shanghai’s Covid lockdowns, Chinese social media saw [similar tactics](. And in a sense, they’re a version of the coded, clubby language, full of inside references and obscure jokes, that’s endemic on all social media. That particular form of communication can be alienating and divisive, as anyone who has watched political arguments unfold over Facebook or Twitter can attest. It’s refreshing, and even surprising, to be reminded that it can serve a purpose.—[Drake Bennett](mailto:dbennett35@bloomberg.net) The big story Elon Musk’s Neuralink is working on implants for the spinal cord and eyes, and is aiming for approval of its[human brain implants]( in six months. Get fully charged NSO Group was sued by journalists alleging their [phones were hacked.]( Fintech companies didn’t do enough to stop PPP fraud, the House said. Emmanuel Macron blasted a new US law subsidizing [EV production.]( Follow Us More from Bloomberg Get Bloomberg Tech weeklies in your inbox: - [Power On]( for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more, every Sunday - [Game On]( for reporting on the video game business, delivered on Friday - [Cyber Bulletin]( for exclusive coverage on the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage, sent every Wednesday Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Tech Daily newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, [sign up here]( to get it in your inbox. [Unsubscribe]( [Bloomberg.com]( [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( [Ad Choices](