Citizen journo goes missing

Wuhan, Feb. 10: Over the past couple of weeks, Chinese citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin have served as the world’s eyes and ears inside Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak.

Broadcasting via their mobile phones, they’ve offered a glimpse of how dire things have been. Many of those videos have been posted to Twitter and reposted on YouTube. Now one of them is missing.

Chen has been out of reach for more than 20 hours. Fang, who was silent much of Friday until a video posted in the evening, was previously detained briefly by authorities for his video of corpses in a hospital. When he filmed the dramatic moment people in hazmat suits broke down his apartment door to take him into quarantine, it sparked hundreds of comments urging the authorities to release him.

It’s no accident that their posts grew viral on American platforms. China’s internet watchdog has stepped up its policing efforts, announcing it would conduct “targeted supervision” on social media platforms Weibo, WeChat and Douyin.