Famous popcorn. You are what you share. And what this means is that limited information

Famous popcorn. You are what you share. And what this means is the limited information that you used to share on the Internet often works in favor of the image that you want to build. And this stands true for its great strategy for social media influence and also for one of the world's most powerful leaders leader the President of China, Xi Jinping. A decade ago, the Chinese Internet was much like the rest of yours.

You could search for topics critical of the CPC. Results would pop up for China's darkest chapters in history. But to cut to the present, where the Internet in China is a bit of an alternate reality, there are checks, there are restrictions, there is surveillance, and there's also a massive firewall at work. And now, just a few days ahead of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China, Beijing has once again targeted its Internet curbs Natala's popular censorship. Circumvention tool users say that servers have suddenly started getting blocked.

They are a step up from the common VPN networks and let people access websites blocked by the government at a time when the Chinese policy is at its most sensitive. In recent years, the sweeping block of several protocols marks a big step up in censorship. And such censorship is very common, although it happens at a pretty low scale. For instance, the checks are being updated every year for the 4 June anniversary of Tiananmen Square. It's not just the web portal.

Censorship has also been partnered on social media websites as well. In 2014, two years after coming to power, Xi Jinping banned Instagram from China. They were put in the same group as Facebook and Twitter after the portals became a source of information coming out of Xinjiang. As China began to carry out its abuse and genocide of the minority communities there. A few months ago, a popular influencer disappeared briefly from the web after streaming himself eating a tank-shaped cake on the Tiananmen anniversary.

Many users in China say that they cannot speak their minds on texting platforms like WeChat. Some accounts describe the experience as constantly being under watch. The China censorship of social media websites has been pretty strict, to say the least. And people have been detained for things as trivial as their ranks against the traffic police in China. The Chinese leaders have long taken an authoritarian approach to social control.