"It would not be surprising to find that everything on Whatsapp gets blocked, forcing users in China to use unencrypted, monitored and censored services like WeChat." "They have moved to brute censor all non-text content," a researcher, who was only known as Charlie Smith, told AP. Like a recent ban on livestreaming, censors could have banned images and video being sent on Whatsapp because they were too hard to track and block, say censorship watchers. Hopefully, Zimbabweans won’t see the same fate as China in the upcoming year.The censorship also comes as the government gets its ship in order for a Congress meeting later this year, where the country's top leaders are selected. So it’s a big loss for Facebook as they have been trying to capture the large Chinese market but have failed to do so as Facebook itself has been unavailable in China since 2009. Interestingly, WhatsApp was the only Facebook app that was still accessible from the country until now. However, people using Android phones aren’t affected that much as they can easily download VPNs from third party services but most Google services aren’t even available there also.
People in China are not so fortunate to have that VPN option easily accessible as the country has banned VPNs and Apple has even gone on to remove 60 VPN apps from their App Store following that decision.
However, in the event that we find ourselves in the situation of people in China, you can always use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access WhatsApp if it is the one that’s been blocked and the internet is still up. Whether it will happen or not is still unclear. We’ve seen it happen as I mentioned earlier so it is definitely possible. Locally, there hasn’t been a facility like that setup yet so if WhatsApp is to be blocked then every internet service provider or mobile operator would have to be told to do so. In China, it is a bit easier for apps to be blocked as the country has a firewall which monitors and controls any internet traffic that moves in and out of the country. So it brings the question, could Zimbabwe be next to have WhatsApp being blocked? Last year, we got the wake-up call when the i nternet was briefly disrupted and people couldn’t send WhatsApp messages also. Zimbabwe is about to enter an election period and people have already started registering to vote.
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