Deleted articles added to China Digital Times' 404 archive in September 2026

China Digital Times (CDT), a site that documents censorship on the Chinese internet, added 31 articles, mainly from WeChat, to its "404 Deleted Content Archive" between 1 and 30 September, according to a summary it published on 2 November (404 is the error code for a page that does not exist). In the same summary, the archive's contents are described as only a small fraction of what disappears from the Chinese internet each day, so the 31 articles cannot be taken as the total of deletions there. The deletions happen on Chinese platforms and readers outside China do not need to change any settings, but anyone citing or reposting articles from those platforms should allow for the original links to stop working.

According to the archive's list page, the project preserves articles blocked or deleted by internet censorship, and since 2021 it has been organised as a list giving each article's original address and a CDT backup. On the same page, limited editorial capacity and the way articles are collected are given as the reasons the count of "deleted articles" is not comprehensive and does not represent the full picture of online censorship. In the archive's assessment, the great majority of these articles disappeared because of content censorship, and a very small share may have been deleted by their authors under pressure. The original-address column records only that a link is dead and gives no reason for the deletion.

The dates in CDT's summary refer to when articles were posted on the CDT website, so the 31 were not necessarily deleted in September. We went through the list page as it stood on 8 November and found that 29 of the 31 came from WeChat Official Accounts (accounts that publish articles on WeChat), with one from the question-and-answer site Zhihu, one from a media collective's website, and none from Weibo. The tally shows which articles reached the archive and is shaped by how they were collected, so it cannot be read as each platform's share of deletions.

The largest group among the September additions concerns a Beijing woman found in Shandong 26 years after she went missing, with six deleted articles. Commentators raised questions about trafficking, household registration and official responsibility, and according to the 2 November summary police apparently had not opened a case. After a knife attack in a Guangzhou shopping district, the deleted commentary objected to the word "indiscriminate" being used online to describe the case, on the grounds that the attacker appeared to target only women. CDT also compiled a piece on censorship and self-censorship, and wrote that it escaped censorship because it did not specifically mention the attack.

CDT describes a case in Shaoyang, Hunan, as official extortion through "distant-water fishing" (police going to other jurisdictions to arrest people and intimidate them for money), and of the three related articles CDT compiled, only one, a Zhihu answer, was deleted. In the summary, an entrepreneur held under residential surveillance at a designated location (RSDL, a coercive measure that restricts a person's liberty somewhere other than a detention centre) paid RMB 100 million, of which RMB 65 million went into Shaoyang government accounts. The county public security bureau's chief and deputy chief were removed from their posts in July 2025 and at least 15 people were disciplined, and as of the 2 November summary no criminal charges had been brought.

The same summary covers new drone rules in Beijing, due to take effect in mid-November, and the deletion of a WeChat Official Account article about them that a CDT editor described as mild in tone. At a car-lamp manufacturer in Changzhou, 107 new employees resisted a company demand that they either leave with half a month's pay or move to a lower-paid production line, and the company apologised and raised their compensation. Two related articles were deleted, one of which argued for learning English in order to speak out internationally. An investigation in Wuhan into a xiangsheng (crosstalk comedy) performer's adaptation of a revolutionary "red song" ended with the organiser fined RMB 486,874 and the theatre fined RMB 110,000, and one related article was deleted.

Perspective

The archive records the result, a dead link, and does not show who deleted an article or under which rules. A 2016 report by the research group Citizen Lab tested a different part of the process, the filtering of WeChat chat messages and of the app's built-in browser. The report's conclusion is that filtering runs on the server side and that keyword filtering is enabled only for accounts registered with mainland China phone numbers, continuing even after such an account links an international number. Users receive no notice when a message is blocked, more keywords are blocked in group chats than in one-to-one chats, and some keywords that were blocked could be sent in later tests.

Citizen Lab's measurements date from 2016 and cover chat keywords and URLs in the built-in browser. Deleting an Official Account article after publication is a different mechanism, so the report cannot explain September's 31 articles. Its value here is as a record of one app applying different rules by account, with separate URL lists for China-registered and international accounts in the built-in browser. Whether those rules have changed since is outside the report's scope.

One rule currently in force is the Provisions on the Governance of the Online Information Content Ecosystem (网络信息内容生态治理规定), issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in force since 1 March 2020 and applicable within China. The Provisions list 11 kinds of "illegal information" (违法信息) that may not be created, copied or published (制作、复制、发布), including content that endangers national security, spreads rumours, insults or defames others, or violates privacy, plus nine kinds of "negative information" (不良信息) to be guarded against. A platform that finds such content must act immediately, keep records and report to the competent authorities. On 29 October we searched the full text word by word and found no provision requiring a platform to notify the publisher when it acts on content, or allowing the publisher to object.

The revision of the Measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services (互联网信息服务管理办法（修订草案征求意见稿）) is still a draft. The CAC opened a second round of public comment on 3 July 2026, closing on 2 August, and as of 8 November we had found no report of a final text. The purpose stated in the CAC's notice is promoting the healthy and orderly development of internet information services, protecting the lawful rights and interests of citizens, legal persons and other organisations, and safeguarding national security and the public interest. Under the draft, platforms that find prohibited content must take measures such as deleting or blocking it, cutting links, restricting account functions and monetisation, or closing accounts, with the stated aim of preventing the information from spreading (防止信息扩散).

The Provisions provide only for complaints and reports from the public. The draft, which revises a separate set of measures, additionally requires channels for user appeals and human customer service. Large platforms would have to handle complaints, reports and appeals concerning content prohibited by laws and administrative regulations, and concerning negative information, within 24 hours.

The CAC's notice covers the purpose of the draft and does not address any individual article. The archive's notes attribute most disappearances to content censorship but do not record why any given article was deleted. We did not separately look for explanations from platforms or regulators about individual articles, so the reason for any single deletion cannot be determined from the archive's data.

Anyone who needs to cite a WeChat Official Account article over the long term can save a copy at the time of citing it. That advice is our own inference from the archive's record of dead links, and CDT does not make it. A copy deals with the dead link but cannot prove the text has not been altered. People inside China have another risk to weigh, since the conduct the current Provisions prohibit includes copying, and we infer that saving or forwarding content deemed illegal information falls within their scope.

The archive's list page has a submission entry, "404给CDT" ("404 to CDT"), for anyone who finds a deleted article and wants to pass it to the archive. We have not checked how well this entry protects submitters' identities, and people in places where submitting carries risk need to assess that first.

Still to watch are whether the draft is formally published, whether the user-appeal and 24-hour requirements for large platforms stay in it, and CDT's summaries over the coming months.

For comparison, in Hong Kong, Part 2 of Schedule 4 to the Implementation Rules for Article 43 of the National Security Law, as published in 2020, lets a designated officer require a publisher to remove a message, or a platform to disable it, without first going to court. The officer acts on the authorisation of the Commissioner of Police, approved by the Secretary for Security, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect the message is likely to constitute or cause an offence endangering national security. A requirement sent to a publisher must be in writing, but the schedule has no provision for giving reasons or a route of appeal, or for notifying the publisher when the requirement goes to the platform (we did not check whether later amendments changed this schedule). According to Hong Kong Free Press, citing Google's transparency report, the Hong Kong government asked Google to remove 330 items in 2022, 57 of them related to national security.

Singapore's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) starts from a different remedy. On the POFMA Office's website, the primary tools are correction directions, which require the recipient to insert a notice against the original post with a link to the Government's clarification and do not require removal, while a stop communication or disabling direction may be used in more serious cases. We read only those web pages, so the text of the Act, its appeal process and the number of directions issued are not covered here. We are a community based in Taiwan, where Article 46 of the Protection of Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act requires a platform to restrict children's access to content, or remove it first, once the competent authority tells the platform the content harms children's physical or mental health; the article has no court step and protects only children and young people.

When comparing content-removal regimes, readers can ask whether a reason must be given and the publisher notified when content is acted on, whether the publisher can appeal, and who hears that appeal. The standards in official documents belong in the comparison too, for example how the speed of acting on rumours, insults and defamation is balanced against an appeals process, and whether reported content can be dealt with inside a time limit. Which rules apply to third-party archives of deleted articles is another point to compare. Whether an appeals system lets publishers learn why an article was deleted depends on the final text and on how platforms implement it.