Chinese citizens angered by Shanghai's ongoing lockdowns are evading censorship of a viral post and video criticizing the government by minting them into NFTs
Growing popularity of decentralised ledger technology presents fresh challenge for country's censors Tweets: @caseynewton , @tim , @katebevan , @jerrybrito , @alisonkilling , and @youtuberlaw Tweets: Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Fascinating story about Chinese citizens evading censorship by minting their dissent as NFTs. But as long as censors continue block links to them on social network, unclear what the real impact is https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Tim Bradshaw / @tim : Chinese people are putting social media posts on the blockchain as NFTs to evade censors, @EleanorOlcott & @ruiyanggloriali report. Discoverability remains a problem - but still, a rare example of decentralised social tech actually being used/useful https://www.ft.com/... Kate Bevan / @katebevan : ooh, this is very clever - finally, an actual and rather brilliant use case for NFTs https://www.ft.com/... Jerry Brito / @jerrybrito : No matter what else is going on, this has always been why crypto matters for me https://www.ft.com/... @alisonkilling : Chinese citizens put critical videos on the blockchain to stop them being deleted, but censors can still delete the links, make them difficult to find and threaten anyone sharing them https://www.ft.com/... Lior Leser / @youtuberlaw : That's an incredible development. Using NFTs to mint protest articles and videos and put them out of reach of the authorities. This can revolutionize protests around the world. https://giftarticle.ft.com/... Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
China's censorship apparatus has spent years closing off channels one by one: a citizen was prosecuted over a critical message shared on WhatsApp back in 2018, and last September regulators went after pessimistic financial blogs and social accounts outright. On the same day this story ran, censors were also expanding the display of users' locations and IP addresses under posts, tightening attribution on domestic platforms.
Against that backdrop, Shanghai residents angry about ongoing lockdowns have found a workaround with an unusual property: once a post or video is minted as an NFT, it lives on a decentralised ledger outside the reach of domestic deletion tools. The catch, as Casey Newton notes in the coverage, is that censors can still block links to those NFTs on social networks — so the content survives even if its distribution does not.
First-order effects
- Censors must now police links rather than content itself: deleting the original post no longer removes the minted copy, so enforcement shifts to blocking NFT marketplace URLs and threatening people who share them.
- Dissenting material migrates onto foreign-run blockchains and NFT platforms, moving storage of politically sensitive media outside Chinese jurisdiction for the first time in this censorship cycle.
Second-order effects
- Platform-level countermeasures intensify — the same-day expansion of IP-address and location displays shows censors responding by raising identification pressure on sharers rather than chasing each copy.
- Users rotate toward adjacent hard-to-trace channels, as later protesters did with AirDrop-shared anti-Xi Jinping posters, suggesting each closed loophole pushes dissent to the next least-traceable tool.
Third-order effects
- The pattern exposes a structural limit: decentralised records resist deletion, but access still runs through chokepoints — as Hong Kong, Lebanon and Iran protests showed with bitcoin, governments that control connectivity or exchange liquidity can neutralise censorship-resistant assets without touching the ledger itself.
- If minting becomes routine, censorship becomes a distribution-layer contest between state-controlled social networks and offshore crypto infrastructure, with effectiveness decided by whether citizens can reach foreign platforms at all.
The trend: Chinese political dissent is migrating toward deletion-resistant technologies — blockchains, AirDrop, encrypted messaging — while the state responds by controlling distribution chokepoints rather than individual copies.