From July 10-12, 2025, Weibo engaged in a “very high” censorship effort to suppress posts about the Italian police’s arrest of an alleged PRC hacker. This involved Level IV censorship (26%) and Level III engagement, with censored posts receiving 7,967 interactions prior to removal.
Beijing’s objective was to minimize awareness of these accusations, which clash with PRC claims that China is a victim, not a perpetrator, of malicious hacks. PRC officials likely sought to obscure the case given their limited control over overseas judicial proceedings. Some censored posts suggested Xu’s arrest was a provocation similar to the 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, while others mentioned Xu allegedly hacked US university computers to steal COVID research on behalf of the PRC Ministry of State Security. Additional removed posts claimed it was unsafe for PRC IT professionals to travel abroad and echoed PRC government complaints about US overstepping its jurisdiction.
