在西方看来，国内的反穆斯林言论有一种似曾相识的形式：它传播刻板印象，疏于因果关系，把伊斯兰教等同于恐怖主义，把非白人移民等同于少数民族的灭绝。
上周五在新西兰基督城的两座清真寺发生枪击事件后，中国社交媒体掀起了一股庆祝浪潮。
在每月活跃用户多达4.46亿、比Twitter还要多1.2亿的新浪微博上，主流媒体报道对袭击事件的报道中充斥着反穆斯林言论和对枪手的支持。
中国国内某主流新闻媒体发布的一段视频下点赞最高的评论，将穆斯林比作“癌细胞”，并要求政府避免重蹈新西兰的覆辙。在撰写本文的时候，这个观点已经被400多人点赞。
其实这样的评论并不能代表国内的所有人，许多微博用户发表了有力的反驳，一些人还写了文章来谴责反穆斯林情绪。但在主流媒体微博帖子下，“最受欢迎评论依然是那些充斥着仇恨的言论。”
在宾夕法尼亚大学的中国学者方可成看来，国内社交媒体上的恐伊斯兰言论只来自一小部分人。但自美国总统大选后，这一比例大幅上升。
最近，中国国内另一个的媒体机构澎湃新闻在微博上向1600万粉丝发布了14条关于大屠杀的新闻。在这些微博下面，有7条“热门”评论表达了明显反穆斯林或支持枪手的言论，他们一共被点赞1590次，只有两条谴责大屠杀的评论登上了“榜首”。
在《新京报》、《环球时报》等国内主流新闻媒体上，也可以看到同样的现象。
拥有10亿用户的全球第三大社交媒体应用——微信也不例外。一篇名为《枪手宣言书上反映了欧洲白人男子的深切焦虑》的文章将此次袭击描述为“英勇的报复”，浏览量很快超过了10万次。
这篇文章里还包括一项民意调查：10881名参与调查的读者中，有76%的人表示，他们非常同情枪手。另一篇名为“新西兰大屠杀不是恐怖袭击”的帖子，详细引用了枪手的宣言，并在微信群里通过截图进行分享传播。在中国类似Quora的问答平台知乎上，即使对宣言部分内容的翻译根本不准确，却依然广为流传。
在新西兰凶手进行枪击现场直播的数小时后，Facebook、YouTube和Twitter纷纷删除了屠杀视频。（袭击发生后的24小时内，Facebook删除了150万份视频）微博和微信也紧随其后，但受到的关注要少得多。这些视频虽已被删除，但枪手的声明依旧可以在两个平台上很容易被找到，同时还有中文翻译版本。
错综复杂的“规范手段”并没有对极端主义和仇恨言论给予太多关注，要控制针对少数民族或少数民族的仇恨言论的概念从来没有被广泛接受或理解。西方“政治正确”的观念往往被忽视，那些仇恨言论的新闻报道是从西方右翼新闻中“提炼”，并重新包装，以突出西方社会所感知到的问题。
但这个角度一直相对安全，不会受到其他的干预。另一方面，网上对女权主义、LGBTQ权利和其他进步事业的讨论被认为触及了国内问题，受到比较密切的“关注”。
微博和微信的架构也极大地放大了极端主义的声音。
微博与Twitter有一个重要的区别：它将最受欢迎的评论或回复直接放在原始帖子的下方，这个功能使得人们更方便对某件事情进行争议，也很容易引导用户走向两极分化。
相较于微博而言，微信则是一个能够高度隔离的空间，其浏览功能来自订阅某机构和个人频道的文章公号。
正如 Tow Center（哥伦比亚大学的一个数字新闻研究中心）在2018年的一份报告所指出的，微信上的信息共享和发现机制几乎完全发生在用户的个人网络中。这个空间被一个单一的媒体所主导，这个媒体会出现“严重的两极分化情况，不仅实在数量、范围和议题议程上，都处于完全的领导地位”。
微博和微信是两个在中国国内最常见的信息来源，所以上面有许多个人和团体营销号经营的媒体渠道。因为他们依赖广告、品牌内容和观众的赞助，所以更多的受众浏览则意味着更高的收入，并且不受像传统媒体机构那样的“监督”，所以这更能加剧上述的两极分化。
“许多营销号会利用人们的恐惧和仇恨。”反吃瓜联盟的一名成员说道，这是在社交媒体上核实新闻的全志愿者团队，“他们不断重复这个套路，编造关于穆斯林、黑人、女性和LGBTQ群体的虚假故事，来提供给受众。”
国内社交媒体平台的巨大力量正在推动极端主义和另类右翼言论在全球范围内的传播，而另一方面，网民又无法真正实现和外界网络的接触。
即使有志愿者从外国网站下载解说视频，加上中文字幕，然后上传到微博上。但是，还是有更多的人进行反驳。
新西兰的这起枪击事件并不是国内网络中的第一起、甚至不是最近讨论最多的反映恐伊斯兰症蔓延的事件。两个月前，国内春节之际，有网友指责国内某主流电视台“向清真规则投降”，因为他们使用了简化版本猪的形象。
去年年初，哈萨克裔中国女演员Reyizha Alimjan在微博上发帖说，她没有庆祝农历新年。这条微博被解读为一种敌对姿态，Alimjan受到了辱骂和威胁的轰炸，促使她完全告别了微博。其他的争议——通常是针对航空公司提供的清真食品之类的不满——也会定期发生。
在西方看来，国内的反穆斯林言论有一种似曾相识的形式：它传播刻板印象，疏于因果关系，把伊斯兰教等同于恐怖主义，把非白人移民等同于少数民族的灭绝。
宾夕法尼亚大学研究另类右翼的学者指出，早在2013年，她在采访国内女权主义活动人士时，就注意到反穆斯林言论有所上升。
穆斯林活动人士成为谣言的目标，传言称他们得到了沙特阿拉伯的资助；此前，他们被指责与美国的基金会、希拉里·克林顿等西方势力有联系。
还有像“白左”和“圣母”这样的字眼，也在网上被用于那些持进步观点的人。“关于西方自由民主的困境和衰落的描述总是吸引着许多民族主义者，即使他们并没有真正对难民和左翼西方人持有强烈的看法，甚至一点了解都没有。”研究国内社交媒体的右翼话语的研究员张晨辰表示。
2018年，张分析了问答网站知乎上的1038条帖子。她发现，保守主义话语受到“西方政治中右翼民粹主义的词汇和论据”以及先前存在的民族主义和种族主义观点的影响。
美国极端分子已经开始关注中国国内的“观众”了。“baizuo”(白左)一词已被小规模采用。去年，一个著名的另类右翼新闻网站开通了一个微博账户，尽管它没有引起多少关注。
方可成说:“你想想就会觉得有点讽刺。9.11事件发生后，国内的一小群民族主义者为奥萨马·本·拉登欢呼。18年后，一些人转而为白人恐怖分子欢呼。他补充道:“这可能是同一群人，唯一发生改变了的是他们针对的对象，也就是要看他们在世界上把谁当成了敌人。”
本文由加美必读编译自Columbia Journalism Review，原文链接https://www.cjr.org/analysis/weibo-new-zealand-massacre.php?from=groupmessage&isappinstalled=0
After New Zealand massacre, Islamophobia spreads on Chinese
social media
By Tony Lin
March 21, 2019
In the wake of last Friday’s shootings at two mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand, a wave of celebration hit Chinese social media.
On Weibo—China’s Twitter equivalent, with 446 million
monthly active users, 120 million more than Twitter—mainstream coverage of the
attacks was barraged with comments that expressed anti-Muslim rhetoric and
support for the shooter. The top comment under a video clip posted by People’s
Daily likens Muslims to “cancer cells” and asks the Chinese government to avoid
making the same mistakes as New Zealand. People’s Daily is China’s largest news
outlet and the official state paper, and its comments section is heavily
censored. Yet at the time of writing this comment is in the highest position of
visibility and has been liked by more than 400 people.
Such comments aren’t representative of the Chinese
population. Many Weibo users posted emphatic rebuttals, and some wrote articles
decrying anti-Muslim sentiment. But again and again, the “most-liked” comments
under mainstream media posts on Weibo are filled with hate speech.
“Islamophobic speech on Chinese social media only comes from a small group of
people. But there has been a drastic rise since 2016,” Kecheng Fang, a veteran
Chinese journalist and media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania,
tells me, noting the influence of the US presidential election.
One of China’s largest digital newspapers, ThePaper.cn,
published fourteen news posts about the massacre to its 16 million followers.
Under those posts, seven “top” comments made statements that were explicitly
anti-Muslim or in support of the shooter. Together they have been liked 1,590
times. Only two comments condemning the massacre made it to the top of the
pile. The same pattern can be observed on the feeds of The Beijing News, Global
Times, and other mainstream Chinese news outlets. (The public discussions
taking place under the posts of political commentators and individuals are even
more unhinged.)
WeChat, the world’s third-largest social media app at 1
billion users, is no exception. An article titled “The names on the gunman’s
magazines reflect the deep anxiety of European white men” that described the
attacks as “heroic revenge” quickly surpassed 100,000 views (WeChat’s view
count limit). The article included a poll: 10,881 readers who participated, or
76 percent, responded that they were very or somewhat sympathetic to the
shooter. Another post, entitled “New Zealand massacre is not a terrorist
attack,” quotes at length from the gunman’s manifesto and was shared in
screenshots across WeChat groups. On Zhihu, China’s Quora-like Q&A
platform, inaccurate translations of parts of the manifesto also spread widely.
Hours after the gunman streamed the shooting live, Facebook,
YouTube, and Twitter raced to scrub their sites of the video. (Facebook removed
1.5 million copies of the video in the 24 hours after the attack.) Weibo and
WeChat followed suit, but under much less scrutiny. The video has been removed,
but the shooter’s manifesto can be easily found on both platforms, alongside
its Chinese translation.
China’s intricate and omnipresent censorship mechanism does
not pay much attention to extremism or hate speech. Instead, it focuses
strictly on the expression of anti-government opinions and calls for offline
protest. The very concept of controlling hate speech against ethnic groups or
minorities has never been widely accepted or understood, and the Western idea of
being “politically correct” tends to be dismissed—but topics like Taiwanese or
Tibetan independence are treated with great caution. Writing about the
government “re-education” camps for Western China’s Uighur minority is also
extremely sensitive and would prompt severe punishment like the deletion of the
user account altogether, but Chinese conservative discourse usually doesn’t
touch those issues; inside the country there’s very little information
available. Instead, ideas are recycled from Western right-wing news and
repackaged to highlight the perceived problems of Western societies. This angle
has always been relatively safe from government intervention. Online discussion
of feminism, LGBTQ rights, and other progressive causes, on the other hand, are
considered to touch on domestic issues and are scrutinized closely by censors.
The architecture of Weibo and WeChat also dramatically
amplifies extremist voices. I have been analyzing hate speech on Chinese social
media since 2013, as a media researcher at the University of Hong Kong. Weibo,
like Twitter, is a thread-based microblog platform that was inspired by the
Bulletin Board System, but it has an important difference: it places the most
liked or commented reply directly below the original post. This function turns
controversy into visibility. The platform also provides little context for
conversations, steering users toward polarization rather than nuance.
WeChat, whose subscription function publishes articles from
institutional and individual channels, is a highly segregated space. As a Tow
Center report from 2018 notes, information sharing and discovery on WeChat
almost exclusively occur within a user’s personal network. The space is
dominated by a monoethnic media that is “asymmetrically polarized, with the
right leading in volume, reach, and skewed issue agenda.”
Weibo and WeChat are a source of daily information in China,
and many individuals and small groups called Ying Xiao Hao (营销号,
marketing accounts) run grassroots media channels as small businesses. Because
they depend on ads, branded content, and patronage from viewers, a larger
audience means higher income, and they don’t have the oversight or
accountability of a traditional media institution. “Many
Ying Xiao Hao take advantage of people’s fear and hate,” says a
member of No Melon Group (反吃瓜联盟), an all-volunteer team that
fact-checks news on social media. “And they keep repeating this formula to
produce fake stories about Muslims, black people, women, and LGBTQ communities.
It feeds them.”
The enormous power of Chinese social media platforms is
enabling the global circulation of extremist and alt-right discourses—and
China’s Great Firewall might, counterintuitively, be helping the circulation.
In China, there are volunteers downloading PragerU’s alt-right explainer videos
from YouTube, adding Chinese subtitles, and uploading them to Weibo. But the
same audience can’t directly access the abundant rebuttals published on
YouTube, and it’s impractical to translate and share those rebuttals in anticipation.
Once misinformation starts to spread, then, because of China’s firewall, it
takes much more effort to rein in.
The Christchurch shootings aren’t the first or even the most
discussed recent events to reveal the spread of Islamophobia in Chinese cyberspace.
Two months ago, on Chinese New Year, CCTV was accused of surrendering to halal
rules by “intentionally omitting” the image of a pig in an illustration for the
Year of the Pig. Early last year, Reyizha Alimjan, a Chinese actress of Kazakh
descent, posted on Weibo that she didn’t celebrate the lunar new year. The post
was interpreted as a hostile gesture against Han Chinese and Alimjan was
bombarded with insults and threats, prompting her to leave Weibo entirely.
Other controversies—often protests against halal food being served on airlines
or sold in stores—occur periodically.
To Western eyes, anti-Muslim rhetoric in China takes a
somewhat familiar form: it traffics in stereotypes and lapses in causality,
equating Islam to terrorism and non-white immigration to the extinction of
ethnic majorities. Two violent incidents continue to fuel resentment and
suspicion against the entire Muslim community: in July 2009, a Uyghur protest
in Ürümqi turned violent, leaving nearly 200 people dead and thousands injured,
most of them Han Chinese. And in 2014, four Uyghurs stabbed dozens of people in
a train station in Kunming, Yunnan.
Mengyang Zhao, a media researcher from the University of
Pennsylvania with a focus on the alt-right, tells me that she noticed an uptick
in anti-Muslim speech as early as 2013, when she was interviewing Chinese
feminist activists. The activists were targeted by rumors that claimed they
were being funded by Saudi Arabia; previously, they had been vilified with
accusations of having connections to Western influences like the Ford
Foundation and Hillary Clinton.
Words like baizuo (白左, meaning white leftists) and
shengmu (圣母,
holy mother) are used to dismiss those who hold progressive views. “The
narrative about the troubles and decline of Western liberal democracy and the
strength of China’s authoritarian regime is attractive to many nationalists,
even though they do not really hold strong views about—or have any knowledge
of—refugees and left-wing Westerners,” says Chenchen Zhang, a researcher based
in Brussels who studies right-wing discourse on Chinese social media. In 2018,
Zhang analyzed 1,038 posts on Zhihu, the Q&A website. She found that
conservative discourse is influenced by the “vocabulary and arguments of
right-wing populism in Western politics,” along with pre-existing nationalist
and racist views.
American extremists have started taking notice of the
opportunity for an audience in China. The term “baizuo” has been adopted on a
small scale. A prominent alt-right news site opened a Weibo account last year,
although it attracted very little attention.
“It is somewhat ironic if you think about it,” says Kecheng
Fang. “In the aftermath of 9/11, a small group of nationalists in China cheered
for Osama bin Laden. After eighteen years, some people cheered for the white
terrorist instead.” He adds: “It could have been the same group of people. What
changed is who they define as enemies in a globalized world.”
