I can see the young girl’s panic and hesitation in the face of all this. She emptied her Weibo account, turned off her WeChat friend request, and searched with her cell phone number and WeChat signal, only to see “This user does not exist”. In the headline, she posted a short statement, saying she couldn’t understand the slander and abuse online because “I just accidentally got infected with New Crown, and I am also a victim.” But the statement ended with an apology: “I’m here to apologize to the citizens of Chengdu for the trouble I’ve caused and for breaking everyone’s otherwise peaceful life ……”
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An overlooked fact is that Zhao Yu’s information had already made its way to the Internet before the official notification of the outbreak.
It was 11 p.m. on December 7 when a screenshot beginning with “Preliminary investigation” appeared on Weibo. In this screenshot, Zhao Yu’s unusually detailed information, including her age, home address, ID number, and her whereabouts for the past three days down to the exact time and minute, suddenly became public content that was reprinted at will – from this moment on, she lost all control over her privacy.
It all started when Zhao Yu’s grandmother went to the hospital for a checkup and was diagnosed with New Crown Pneumonia, and she, as a close contact, tested positive for nucleic acid in the isolation test. In order to cooperate with the epidemic prevention department to do the investigation, she told the staff the most detailed trajectory of her past few days, but did not expect that this eventually turned out to be a sharp weapon to hurt herself.
At 7 a.m. on the 8th, the official briefing released brief information about three confirmed cases and one asymptomatic infected person. In the briefing, Zhao Yu, as one of the three confirmed patients, was announced to stay at a place that almost matched the trajectory in the screenshot. Soon, “Chengdu confirmed case’s granddaughter” was on Weibo’s hot search.
The discussion on this topic was first interpreted as a kind of heartbreaking argument – Zhao Yu’s grandmother went to the hospital for a checkup on the 6th, while she also went to a bar on the 6th, knowing that her grandmother was a suspected case and going there on purpose, obviously with impure motives. Such questions, along with abuse, flooded this hot topic, and Zhao Yu was labeled as “ruining the results of Chengdu’s epidemic prevention”. The fact is that Zhao’s grandmother, Lu, went to the hospital on the afternoon of December 6 for a cough and coughing up phlegm, and the diagnosis was made on December 7, while Zhao Yu did not know that her grandmother had been diagnosed with the new crown when she went to the bar on the evening of December 5 and early morning of December 6.
The girl in Chengdu who was scolded on the hot search and her lifelong leaked privacy
Second, the story of a young girl going to several bars at night was infinitely amplified, and “20 years old,” “4 bars,” and “no fixed occupation” instantly swept Zhao Yu into a storm of discussion about The storm of her private life. Some people put the four bars revealed in her track together on a map, saying that she could actually change venues so much in one night, and labeled her as the “Queen of Changing Venues”, implying that she had an indiscreet private life. The four words were also placed on other videos that had nothing to do with her, those videos originally showed different girls bouncing around, or someone making some indecent moves, and the person who forwarded the video said it was Zhao Yu, and in the comments below, someone also called her out with extremely harsh words. In a way, Zhao Yu was the one who was chosen by public opinion. In the official briefing, the trajectories of the other two confirmed patients and one asymptomatic infected person were also released together, but they were not discussed as much as Zhao Yu.
Because of her privacy and double shame, Zhao Yu has already suffered a “social death” during her quarantine. In an interview with Cover Story, she said people called every day after that. “At times, there were six a minute,” so much so that when hospital staff called, her phone was on hold. At the same time, she received all kinds of text messages and Twitter comments attacking her life.
One could see the young girl’s panic and hesitation in the face of it all. She emptied her Weibo account, turned off her WeChat friend request permission, and searched with her cell phone number and WeChat signal, only to see that “the user does not exist”. In the headline, she posted a short statement, saying she couldn’t understand the slander and abuse online because “I just accidentally got infected with New Crown, and I’m also a victim.” But at the end of the statement, she apologized: “I’m here to apologize to the citizens of Chengdu for the trouble I’ve caused and for breaking everyone’s otherwise peaceful life ……”
The Chengdu girl who was scolded on the hot search and her lifelong leaked privacy
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On December 9, Zhao Yu once again posted two messages on today’s headlines, “The internet said I turned four bars in one night, but actually turning was my previous job at the bar. I also did not turn four venues in one day, that night I went to drink with friends first, then the bar, and then went home.” She said she was in charge of ambiance marketing at the bar before, but her honesty was not met with a cessation of violence, but with further stigmatization. Some people with some inexplicable screenshots said Zhao Yu is a “professional escort”, and some even carried a moral stick, saying that she must have “slept with many people” in this job.
S, who works in Chengdu, saw the news online and was very confused. She is a young person who has just graduated and likes to go to bars at 10 pm. Because she likes to dance, but usually there is no suitable venue, the music in the bar is chosen to be very suitable for dancing, and when she encounters a very bombastic song, everyone in the room starts to cheer and rush to stand in the most conspicuous place to dance. For her and her friends, the bar provides a place where “people who want to be seen can be seen, and people who want to hide can hide.” Sometimes when friends fall out of love, they start to cry after dancing and drinking. For S, “the bar is a place where young people can be allowed to lose their temper.”
She emphasizes that going to bars is a hobby, and there’s no shame in that. “It’s also a prejudice to think that going to bars is to relieve stress.” Seeing Zhao Yu being scolded for turning up, her first reaction felt inexplicable, which is normal in their lives. When the music in a bar is not good, or the wine is not available, several people will carpool together and continue in a different bar.
These hotly debated behaviors and professions were originally commonplace in the city where Zhao Yu lives. For Chengdu, the first club opened in 1992, and in 25 years it is now the city with the most bars in the country, with 2,294, 200 more than Shanghai, which comes in second. It’s also an inclusive, hormone-wrapped city that has hosted tattoo exhibitions, given birth to a number of hip-hop artists and groups, and where young people in hanbok and cosplay can often be seen on the streets.
In Chengdu, ambient marketing is common in bars. The director of operations of a bar Zhao Yu visited said that the bar likes to recruit good-looking girls who like to dance to do ambient marketing, and they dance on the dance floor, which can quickly ignite the atmosphere of the scene, and everyone can quickly get into that mood.
On the night of December 9, S went to the playhouse, the one Zhao Yu visited on the 6th night. Usually, there are many cars parked in front of the place, and it is open from night to 6 am. But on this day, the bar was full of police officers, and at 9 p.m. there weren’t many cars at the door. Now, all the bars in Chengdu that can bounce are closed, and young people, like S, are still waiting for these bars to open again.
Ultimately, Zhao Yu doesn’t need to apologize, she has a life of her own, and young people aren’t breaking any laws by going to bars, or going to work in ambient marketing. As Chengdu Daily said in an article speaking out for Zhao Yu, a 20-year-old Chengdu girl was just an ordinary young person in a city of over 21 million people before she was diagnosed.
The story of a girl from Chengdu who was scolded for being in the hot seat and her lifelong privacy
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Zhao Yu is not the only one who has been vilified in this fiasco.
At noon on December 8, Yao Yao received a message from a fan on WeChat saying that her photo was being circulated as Zhao Yu in a WeChat group. The fans sent her screenshots of WeChat, where they commented on her look in the photos while hurling profanities. The fans told her to hurry up and clarify, “the microblogs are all hung up.”
Yao Yao, 19, who has 130,000 followers on Weibo, quickly sent out a tweet five minutes after learning the news, “Randomly taking other people’s photos and spreading them around about my new crown, can this joke be taken lightly?” In life, she is a print model and was in Sanya at the time.
After posting a clarifying microblog, Yaoyao reported the incident to the police and contacted the police station, but the response was that it was out of their hands. A lawyer told Daily People that in a similar situation, one can ask the relevant authorities to remove the online insulting and defamatory remarks, but the crime of insult and defamation is a private prosecution, requiring the victim to file a lawsuit in court, which is very costly to defend. With the high cost of rights, it is difficult to save oneself in cyberspace, but it is too easy to attack others by shooting bullets after easily hitting the keyboard.
Nor is Zhao Yu’s incident an isolated case. From the beginning of the new crown epidemic to the present, information on the identity of those diagnosed has always flowed in some way, and their trajectories have become fodder for the network to be ridiculed and flirted with, and even abused.
The girl in Chengdu who was scolded in the hot search and her lifelong privacy leak
In November this year, less than a day after the incident, a survey document with his height and weight, household address, and even how many rooms and halls his house is, was uploaded to the internet. In this document, even his girlfriend’s ID number and his girlfriend’s friend’s ID number were made public.
The information of the diagnosed people was made public, which means that their lives in the future were seriously affected and even suffered social death.
At the end of January, a family of four from Fujian returned home from Wuhan and, unaware of the epidemic, attended a village clan banquet for 1,000 people. in February, a family of four was diagnosed, their trajectory prior to diagnosis was made public, and the 3,000 people who attended the banquet were asked to quarantine themselves. Soon, the incident hit the Weibo hot search and they were tagged: the King of Jinjiang poison. The rumor mill went from one person infecting a village, to infecting a town, evolving into one person infecting the entire Jinjiang River. The photos of their family of seven were printed out and posted on the street intersections for public awareness. In fact, only 11 people were diagnosed in their entire village, six of whom were their family members.
In March, after a Zhengzhou man returned from Italy and concealed his exit information, his ID number, home address, workplace, flight number he took, and even his parents’ phone numbers were made public in an internal investigation report after the new crown was diagnosed. This document went viral on the internet and he was labeled: Zhengzhou Drug King. Soon, his picture was made public, and the words “Giant Baby Scourge” and “The Price of Ignorance” became prominent headlines in some self-media describing him. Later, he was sentenced to one year and six months in prison for concealing the report, but no one has asked whether the document was justified to be made public.
Laodongyan, a law professor at Tsinghua University, has told the Daily News that personal information is actually an individual right that should be protected by law. “When a piece of information can identify you, in terms of identifiability, if alone or in combination can identify a specific natural person, this information is what the law wants to protect.” Our face data, our whereabouts trajectory, and our shopping records all fall into this category.
Instead, the fact is that, starting with the cat abuse incident in 2006, the public’s joint participation in making the identity information of ordinary people public without screening for the purpose of network wanted seems to have become an orgy to proclaim justice, giving some legitimacy to the information leakage. People who are harmed by the human flesh search rarely speak out in the public opinion space, and in this epidemic, such information leaks have culminated along with the fear of the epidemic.
The boundaries of privacy have receded in this epidemic, which brings potentially more dire consequences. Laodongyan has said that this epidemic has collected so many ID numbers that the next wave of crime can be imagined. “Telecommunication fraud, like this year, such numbers of fraud than before each year is a few dozen percent increase. The public does not know just, (because) he did not cheat to your head.”
On the afternoon of Dec. 9, police reported that at 23:00 on Dec. 7, 2020, Wang Mou (male, 24) forwarded a picture of “Chengdu epidemic and Zhao Moumou’s identity information and activity trajectory” on his microblog, seriously infringing on others’ privacy and causing adverse social impact, and for violating the relevant provisions of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Public Security Management Punishment, Wang Mou has been administratively punished by police according to law.
But those screenshots with Zhao Yu’s personal privacy have remained in the online world forever and cannot be eliminated.
(Zhao Yu, S and Yao Yao are pseudonyms in the article)
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