| In the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in China's Hubei province, government authorities relaxed the tight control they usually maintain over news outlets and the social media posts of ordinary people. As Shawn Yuan writes this week on Backchannel, that brief window of openness slammed shut in early February when the scale and horror of Covid-19 emerged. The government clamped down on news reports about overwhelmed hospitals and official mismanagement. News stories and WeChat posts were censored sometimes minutes after posting to the internet. Yuan, a Chinese-American reporting from China, began taking screenshots of these stories, preserving them as a kind of real-time record of the crisis and the extent of official information suppression. "Judging from these vanished accounts," Yuan writes, "the regime's coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus." Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED |
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