Investors flooded the giraffe post last weekend with comments complaining about China’s slumping stock market, as Bloomberg, CNN, and Reuters reported.
China’s blue-chip index, the CSI 300, has been tumbling amid weakening confidence in consumer spending after the country endured a yearslong COVID siege.
Its stock market has lost more than $6 trillion in value since 2021 and continues to slip, despite Beijing intervening nearly a dozen times in January to stall the decline.
Irate commenters were copy-pasting the headline of a state media article, published on the same day as the giraffe post, that said the “entire country is filled with optimism.”
Ensuing efforts to censor these references often creates a mental cat-and-mouse that can lead to absurdities like protests with blank sheets of paper or the words “him” and “that man” being banned.
Plain old giraffes haven’t been outright banned from Weibo, though some giraffe-related hashtags, like #TheGiraffeIncident, have been blocked, censorship tracking site China Digital Times first reported.
The original article contains 538 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Giraffes appear to be on a path to joining the ranks of Winnie the Pooh and Peppa Pig on Beijing's internet watchlist (www.businessinsider.com)