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The internet, but not as we know it: life online in China, Cuba, India and Russia

Illustration: Guardian

More than half of the world's population is now online, but that does not mean we all see the same thing. From being filtered by the government to being delivered by post, the internet can vary enormously depending on where you live. Here are four illustrated examples

India

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China

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XYZ // Internet
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China’s internet is a case apart from the rest of the world. Google, Facebook, Twitter and the BBC are blocked, and the Guardian has also been blocked intermittently.

Not that many locals are overly bothered. China’s 800 million internet users have hundreds of apps, sites, games and online services to choose from.

Take Xu Zelong. The 24-year-old student’s entire day revolves around being online. After his alarm goes off, he spends another 10 minutes in bed reading messages on his phone and liking his friends’ posts on Wechat, China’s most popular messaging platform.

At work, his boss communicates the day’s tasks over Wechat. Lunch is ordered through the food-ordering app Meituan. If he is seeing his girlfriend that night, they will order a movie through Alipay, run by the vast Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

“It’s very different from everyone else’s internet … There’s this whole other universe out there. With games, Taobao, Wechat, and so on,” said Lokman Tsui, who teaches journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “It’s not a group of people starved for information and looking to be liberated.”

Since the late 1990s, China has blocked its internet users from gaining complete access to the rest of the world with the Great Firewall, which blocks IP addresses and domain names and inspects sent or received data. This is bolstered by laws that make everyone, from internet providers to users, liable for what goes online.

While most users, like Xu, don’t notice, others on Chinese platforms encounter roadblocks on the otherwise smooth internet superhighway.

Searches and posts containing keywords deemed sensitive by the authorities are routinely blocked on platforms such as the microblog Weibo. Filtering for these terms increases during sensitive times, such as when the legislative body is in session or when China is hosting a major international event.

Ahead of the National People’s Congress session in March 2018, presidential term limits were abolished, allowing the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to stay in office indefinitely.

During this time phrases such as “I don’t agree”, “lifelong” and inexplicably the letter “n” were blocked on Weibo.

Wang Nan, 24, who has recently returned to Beijing from studying computer science in Canada, says she has become more aware of the censorship since coming back. The VPN she uses often does not work, and articles she views as harmless, such as one about an LGBT protest, are censored on Wechat.

Some Chinese internet users find ways to get around the censors, for example, using homonyms for blocked words and sending images of articles rather than links to them. Wang said: “If I see a sensitive topic or article that I really want to share with my friends, I won’t talk to them on Wechat. I’ll hold it all in until I meet them face to face.”

Cuba

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Russia

Московский корреспондент
6hrs
In Russia, sites such as Google and Facebook are accessible and there is no great firewall, like in China. Instead, the Russian government promotes local companies, like Yandex, Mail.Ru, and Vkontakte (which looks not dissimilar to Facebook). These sites try to hold on to market share from foreign internet companies.
They’re having some success. The most popular search engine in Russia is Yandex. More Russians use Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki (owned by Mail.Ru) than Facebook. After a taxi-app war, Uber merged with Yandex.Taxi.
Россия
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A protester takes part in the March for Free Internet in central Moscow.
When Dmitry Yevseyev, a Moscow doctor in his early 30s, uses Facebook, he’s usually staying in touch with media-savvy and politically active friends whom he got to know in his 20s. They're largely progressives who have foreign friends.
By contrast, when he uses Vkontakte, he's keeping up with friends from school, as well as relatives and older acquaintances. Facebook wasn't available when he was a teenager, so in middle school, he said, “if you weren’t on Vkontakte, then you were a loser”.
The state's relationship with local social networks is controversial. Recently, a handful of Vkontakte users were charged with extremism after police searched their online accounts for political content.
Last summer there were at least four sensational trials against Vkontakte users for posting memes, including an image of a character from the popular television series Game of Thrones in the place of Jesus Christ. “Jon Snow is risen!” read the caption, which authorities said insulted the sensibilities of religious Russians. More than 400 criminal cases were opened in 2017 for social media content, the majority on Vkontakte, where content was easy to trace.
Analysts said it appeared regional police officials were seeking to meet their quotas by using Vkontakte to gin up criminal convictions, with critics saying the company handed over information far too readily. Vkontakte says the company must comply with law enforcement but has introduced new privacy controls to protect users.