Big Tech firm in China censors use of word ‘Christ’ online

A church in China has been banned from using the word ‘Christ’ on the nation’s largest social media messaging platform.

Early Rain Covenant Church was told by WeChat that a post mentioning a book with ‘Christ’ in the title violated new Communist Party regulations.

The Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services bar Chinese house churches from sharing anything of a religious nature online.

‘Incitement’

According to the Christian charity Release International, members of the church regularly published book reviews and recommendations on WeChat.

But following a post referring to The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, censors informed them: “The word ‘Christ’ you are trying to publish violates regulations on Internet Information Services”.

WeChat cited the grounds for censorship as “including, but not limited to the following categories: pornography, gambling, drug abuse, incitement”.

Persecution

A spokesman for Release International told Premier Christian News: “The only way the church has managed to get anything online with the word ‘Christ’ in is to change one of the letters for a number or a figure.”

He described the actions of the messaging service, which has nearly 1.3 billion monthly active users, as “the most extraordinary form of censorship”.

For the second year in a row, Open Doors has numbered China among the worst twenty offenders in its annual ranking of countries where Christians face the most severe persecution.