Megan Thee Stallion’s risqué Coachella 2022 performance wowed festival fans Saturday (April 16) but also proved to be a huge headache for censors in China. Monitoring site What’s On Weibo noticed that users on Chinese social media and messaging app WeChat have been live-streaming Coachella illegally, with censors trying to catch moments or performances that transgressed China’s increasingly moralistic censorship rules. Alas, Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of her hit song “WAP” proved the undoing of one poor WeChat censor charged with applying the black bar on videos. Struggling to keep up with the dancers, the censor was in the unenviable position of trying to choose what to censor and failing to censor anything, with the black bar whizzing left and right, all over the video. Compoundin...
A judge has approved a request from a group of U.S. WeChat users to delay looming federal government restrictions that could effectively make the popular app nearly impossible to use. In a ruling dated Saturday, Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in California said the government’s actions would affect users’ First Amendment rights, as an effective ban on the app would remove their platform for communication. WeChat is a messaging-focused app popular with many Chinese-speaking Americans that serves as a lifeline to friends, family, customers and business contacts in China. It’s owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent. The group of WeChat users requested an injunction after the U.S. Commerce Department said Friday it would bar WeChat from U.S. app stores and keep it from accessing essential interne...