UM WHAT?

China Censors ‘Big Yellow Duck’

On Tiananmen anniversary.

Never mess with the Internet—and don’t even try to outwit it. Chinese censors banned the phrases “today,” tonight,” “June 4,” and “big yellow duck” (more on that later) on Weibo, the country’s equivalent of Twitter, on Tuesday, the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. So big yellow duck? In an effort to invoke the iconic image (and banned in China) of a Chinese man blocking a line of tanks in the street, posters on Weibo (and now Twitter) replaced the tanks with big yellow ducks. A similar effort was undertaken on China’s Netease website, which re-created the image using Legos, on June 1, but it was quickly removed by censors—but not before becoming an Internet sensation.