In August, Reddit, one of the biggest news aggregator sites on the internet, received a $150 million investment from Chinese technology giant Tencent, who also owns a large share the popular chat program WeChat, and Epic Games, which is behind huge video games like Fortnite and Gears of War.

Tencent, being a mainland Chinese company and the first Asian company to be worth $500 billion, has a history of censoring material deemed controversial by the Chinese government.

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WeChat has been responsible, either directly or indirectly instructed by the Chinese government, for censorship of content on its platform, using “silent” blocks which prevent messages from being sent or received, and for purging users from its platform, as suggested by the Chinese government itself.

This has even happened to users not currently in China who are using the service — Chinese students attending school overseas and using Chinese online services, for example.

China has long been accused of censoring news, especially with recent protests going on in Hong Kong. Protesters have been painted as violent, with cherry-picked news segments highlighting them attacking government officials, while similar violence back upon the protesters is ignored or edited out. Chinese-owned video service TikTok has been censoring content from Hong Kong, anti-government content and content from LGBT+ users.

With Beijing pressuring companies within its own borders to crack down on material on their platforms, Reddit users, understandably, are concerned about censorship on their own platform, now that Tencent was invested in it.

The response came with posting pictures of Winnie the Pooh, an image banned by China because it has been used to mock leader Xi Jinping, and by posting the famous picture of Tank Man, the man who faced down a line of tanks in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 — a picture that most Chinese people believe is a hoax.

This is a much wider issue that disgruntled users on a website, and is in fact an issue of access to information itself.

With Russian influencers already manipulating news content in North America and Europe, and manipulating elections and voting results, it is concerning that China is stepping into the game as well, censoring content to not only its own citizens, but now having their influence spread beyond their own borders.

Social media and news sites are on the front lines of media manipulation, and what happens on these platforms and how it is handled is fundamental to protecting democracy.

It may come as a form of capitalist manipulation, as seen on Reddit.

A recent poll in Canada showed that Canadians do not want Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to be involved in the upcoming 5G wireless rollout, in part due to China’s tendency to censor content.

With China’s increasingly widening reach, democratic countries have a reason to be concerned that China may start affecting their own news content.

Steve Marlow is the program co-ordinator at CFBX, an independent radio station in Kamloops. Tune in at 92.5 FM on the dial or go online to thex.ca.