Prologue: The Vanishing of a Typical Creator

Prologue: The Vanishing of a Typical Creator

In an age when information is sculpted to extremes, disappearance seldom begins with the body; it starts with the screen. One night in mid-September, a certain young livestreamer slipped from the visible map of the domestic internet. First came mutes, folds, wiped posts; then an inaccessible homepage, a grayed-out handle, search results reduced to nothing. Soon his shopfronts went dark. Even short video greetings bearing his likeness, tucked in ordinary people’s phones and hard drives, triggered platform flags for “violations” upon upload—not for captions, music, or length, but at the “face level.” A face became a banned word.

At that moment, “deleting content” upgraded to “deleting a person.” Regardless of how legal texts define “loss of political rights,” what unfolded in the spheres of discourse and daily life was a kind of “social death” without judges or courts.

Chapter One: The Viral Template

Like many grassroots creators, he began with a plain premise: street chats and small tests of purchasing power. A camera trails a young man asking directions, exchanging pleasantries, inviting an elder to pick daily goods, then quietly paying at the register. These scenes, under the big banners of “shared prosperity,” carry a jolt—the ledgers of ordinary life pierce the membrane between lived experience and the official story. In spring 2023, a clip from a southwestern city caught fire—then was swiftly removed and banned. Explanations varied: trafficking in sorrow, monetizing sadness, community-rule breaches. Yet its heat came from puncturing that thin film.

Had it ended there, he might have settled into “soft realism” within permissible bounds. But another script formed in his live room: strong takes, quick tempo, sharp cross-mic debates—“hard verdicts” on how to choose a city, cars versus phones, education’s ROI—translated through familiar brands and scenes. That was his traffic code: replicable, portable, primed for conflict.

Chapter Two: Labels Detonated

His leap from contentious influencer to public topic hinged on a binary: “Fruit People vs. Bot People.” Not a rigorous stratification model, but a symbol machine. It mapped consumer objects onto identity, using an everyday talisman—the phone—to hint at class and cognition: Fruit as “elite,” Bot as “base,” then chaining EVs/sedans, warehouse clubs/wet markets, flagship stores/no flagships, ten subway lines/fewer than ten—assembling a puzzle of disdain.

Simplification turbocharges spread. Phones are high-frequency; everyone has a stance; everyone judges. Lines like “classic Bot logic” and “5k a month doesn’t qualify you to speak” became gold for clips. Audiences found themselves in mockery and counter-mockery, and an arena of oppositions emerged—algorithms love conflict; conflict earns display; display breeds more conflict.

Critiques abounded: crude projection of group traits onto individuals; a whiff of despising poverty and worshiping the foreign; outsourcing “order” and “modernity” into consumer gear, using objects to shame people.

Chapter Three: The Ban Lands

Mid-September brought parallel timestamps. Platforms moved fast: short-video apps, microblogs, video sites, lifestyle feeds—muted, wiped, gone. Official framing crystallized: provincial messaging called it “manufacturing sharp antagonisms, stoking intergroup emotions, vending anxiety for clicks and cash.” A central legal program escalated it to “maliciously inciting extreme confrontation and violent hostility,” a model case in “cleaning up online chaos.”

Days earlier, a nationwide “Clear & Bright” campaign launched to tackle “maliciously stirring negative emotions.” Link the three nodes—campaign, framing, synchronized takedowns—and a chain appears: action announced, action explained, action executed. He became the chain’s exhibit.

Chapter Four: Two Gazes

Meaning demands interpretation; soil shapes harvest.

Beyond the firewall, most read it as a political ban wearing nonpolitical clothes: state-media naming, campaign backdrop, cross-platform sync, face-level blocks. Keywords: social death, chilling effect, Black Mirror metaphors—seeing the body, not hearing the voice. Even those disliking his bluntness argued he shouldn’t be stripped of speech; the worry wasn’t his “right/wrong,” but elastic boundaries and deterrent uncertainty.

Inside, the view diverged. Some cheered the ban: discriminating against vocational grads and low earners, hyping privatization and foreign worship, misleading youth, farming conflict for clicks. Others regretted or opposed it: he disclosed income/taxes, filmed grassroots slices, spurred thought. Still others decoded the political economy: emotion-as-product, label efficiency, controversy-first feeds. “Politics” was toned down, folded into public-interest frames: clean the environment, protect youth, safeguard industry.

Neither sphere owns truth; each is self-consistent. One prioritizes speech, reading control as political. The other prioritizes stability, reading expression as commercial manipulation and invoking “platform responsibility.” Reality wobbles in their overlap.

Chapter Five: Depoliticized Politics

Phrases like “creating division,” “selling anxiety,” “malicious marketing” serve double duty: daily platform-governance logic and, when needed, a wrapper that lets highly political control proceed under nonpolitical labels. This doesn’t deny harms like labeling, manipulation, profiteering; it notes that once “negative emotions” become targets, debate slides from “what sentence was wrong” to “are negative emotions allowed,” turning content disputes into emotion trials.

Here, the chill becomes crowd-schooled. Utter “state,” “government,” “downturn,” “constitution” on a cross-mic, and the reflex isn’t rigor—it’s “cut now.” That reflex broadcasts a stronger message: there are mines here; closer means risk. Viewers feel a shared shiver: ordinary talk can trip unseen wires.

Chapter Six: When the Net Catches a Face

Account wipes are routine. Extending bans through the commerce loop, then into “systemic interception of a face,” goes deeper.

Personalized video greetings are classic fan-economy wares—turning influence into cash flow. Store closures sever cash; blocking uploads reverse-wipes influence at the fan end. Technically easy; the hard part is the threshold. “This face equals violation” moves from sentence-level review to identity recognition and blanket nullification. A person is stripped of public existence: visible in your private gallery, invisible in the public square.

As a persecution pattern, the combo—official naming, campaign backdrop, synchronized platforms, shop closures, third-party blocks, face-level kills—looks like “severe economic harm plus speech deprivation” driven by the state, exceeding mere platform discipline.

Chapter Seven: Law’s Spectrum

To legalize a discourse event requires translation. In one asylum framework: protected ground (political opinion or imputed), persecution (or well-founded fear), and state action or acquiescence.

The opening lies in imputed political opinion: even if one avoids hot words, if authorities and society read political meaning into speech and punish accordingly, the element can be met. State-media framing, a national campaign, pattern evidence, and overseas consensus on depoliticized enforcement help build that chain.

Harder is severity and proof. Detentions, filings, exit controls, family pressure—these individualized enforcement records are “hard proof.” Without them, cases look like platform governance. Yet “severe economic detriment” can qualify when state-led action blacklists someone industry-wide, destroying primary livelihood nationwide and durably, coupled with comprehensive speech deprivation—if evidence is verifiable and linkable: backend notices, closure tickets, failed-upload recordings, cross-platform timelines, income and transaction proofs, client attestations, official archives. Add expert opinions on depoliticized control and country-condition dossiers on “Clear & Bright,” and soft narrative hardens.

Success odds vary: low-to-mid without individualized records; higher with enforcement contacts and economic-harm proofs plus pattern evidence and experts; much higher if filings/detentions/exit controls appear. Law demands a causal chain: state act → persecutory effect → political opinion. Public sentiment can guide, not replace, proof.

Chapter Eight: Why Deploy the Big Machine

“Why swing the hammer at a small creator?” Not about the person—about stacked logics.

Signaling and deterrence: pick the most visible and make a cautionary tale.Replicable spread: identity-by-object memes scale too fast; one-size cuts feel safer than line-by-line triage.Narrative conflict: in uncertain cycles, the master story is “stabilize.” Everyday language that lands inequality and system frictions reads as “anxiety risk.”Industry/brand sensitivities: equating “Bot” with domestic, then shaming low price/non-premium, trips “harm to industry.” Policy and firms align; “hurt-business” talk draws sharp pushback.Campaign KPIs: during special drives, visibility and reportability trump proportionality.Risk-avoidance inertia: “better overblock than underblock,” with costs externalized to the blocked.

Chapter Nine: Mirrors and Stories

“Who manufactures division?” Labels do: flattening complexity into hierarchies. But if blame stops at individuals and ignores institutional splitters—household registration, resource allocation, opaque contests, imbalances—then the message becomes “don’t say what you see,” not “don’t do what you say.” When plain speech is barred, metaphors rise. If “a domestic OS” can’t be named, “Bot” stands in; if “systemic flaws” can’t be said, “Fruit/Bot” carries the load. Not cunning—self-protective reflex. Thus “depoliticized politics” becomes normal: behind ordinary quarrels lurk the unsayable.

Algorithms amplify more than they birth. High-emotion, low-bar content spreads; creators skew toward fast, hard, sharp; complexity collapses into spats. But the origin is life: income, rent, schooling, care, movement, dignity. “Fruit/Bot” is code for fate and order. If order can’t be spoken, symbols speak; when symbols are banned, discourse dives into darker currents.

Epilogue: Disappearing Acts, Remembering Acts

When disappearance is a tool of rule, remembering resists. Not to defend a person or a line, but to trace a path: from street realism to algorithmic peak, from official framing to campaign inclusion, from deleted posts to a banned face through coordinated platforms. Outside readings see political bans in nonpolitical garb; inside readings invoke order and commerce, offering regret or applause within rules. And how, through reflexive “avoidance,” a creator displayed fear so plainly that audiences felt a collective chill: ordinary talk can cross invisible lines.

If law is induction, narrative is memory. Today, a name made “violative” on screens remains a mirror in memory. Three questions on the glass: How can a meme kill? Why does depoliticized speech work so well? When a person is deleted from the square, what do we lose?

Perhaps he reappears on another net, in another tongue; perhaps he chooses silence—or is chosen by it. Either way, the record isn’t about his rise or fall, but about how disappearance occurs and how it signals a moving border—from content to person, political words to life’s metaphors, a few topics to any expression that might spark thinking. That shifting line defines public space—and our sense of safety.

No prescription here, no verdict. Only a line of events: from an elder’s shopping cart to a phone OS; from “cut the feed now” to “this face violates”; from a ban’s arc to two mirrored publics; from the wrapper to the essence. History isn’t enacted by rulings; it endures by story. Remember that a young creator once, roughly but plainly, reminded us: what you see may not be sayable; what you say may not be seeable.

翻译为中文