Endless Thread - When the government wants your socials

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Jeffrey Ngo is from Hong Kong. He used to talk about politics all of the time with his friends in group chats and on social media, from casually sending memes, to planning protests. What happens to online speech when you're unsure how much the government is monitoring your speech, and what the repercussions will be if they don't like it? Show notes: PROFILE: For Jeffrey Ngo, The Fight For Hong Kong is Far From Over (The Hoya) Social Media and the Hong Kong Protests (The New Yorker) Hong Kong protesters join hands in 30-mile human chain (The Guardian) Hong Kong national security law: What is it and is it worrying? (BBC) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. This show tells climate stories like a stubborn optimist, because hope, innovation, and nature itself are key. to solving the challenges ahead. Follow on your favorite podcast app. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

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That's how you get in touch. WBUR SecureTips at Proton.m.m. Or call us or text, signal 646-456-9095. It may be rare for someone to have their life forever altered at the age of seven. But it's possible that Jeffrey Noe is one of the rare ones. It was a very hot and humid day, as our very brutal summer days in Hong Kong. and, you know, I had never seen that many people. Jeffrey was with his family, who had decided, along with many, many other Hong Kong residents,

to speak truth to power. Were people joyful or angry, or was it scary for you, never seeing that many people before? Do you remember how you kind of felt about it? It was definitely not scary. I mean, it was just that people weren't moving at all, because the streets were so filled, and, you know, we were taking over,

I think at least like three lines of traffic. You know, sometimes I go back and look at footage from 2003 to remind myself of what it felt like. Why do you go back and watch footage of it? What motivates you to do that? I think it's just thinking about how that was a defining moment in terms of me being political. I mean, 2003 was a very eventful year,

both in Hong Kong and all around the world. Eventful because of the SARS pandemic, which hit Asia and. and Hong Kong an epicenter for the illness, particularly hard. In China, thousands have been quarantined. Entire apartment complexes have been locked down. The 240 residents... With everybody stuck at home and glued to their TVs,

even seven-year-olds were getting a sense of what was happening elsewhere in the world. I remember the invasion of Iraq. You know, I remember names like Donner Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney. I was a little kid watching TV. A lot about Jeffrey's political identity goes back to this time when he was stuck at home watching world news, then out in the streets with his family to question a key decision made about Hong Kong's future. 2003 was the first large-scale protest in Hong Kong after the handover.

Six years earlier, Britain had handed over control of Hong Kong to China after more than 100 years of British colonial rule. As part of that handover, the two countries made a deal. Hong Kong would be part of China, but for a period, it could still operate somewhat autonomously. It would have a capitalist economy, the kind it was used to having, and a slightly different political setup than the mainland.

The promise was one country, two systems. So they framed it, specifically, the Chinese side framed it as an extension of the way of life. Obviously, that's not how most Hong Kong is solid. a lot of Hong Kongers, especially those who migrated to Hong Kong after World War II, actually did so precisely to flee the Chinese Communist Party regime. Jeffrey says many Hong Kongers were not happy about the deal, because while they didn't necessarily want total independence from China, they did want some autonomy.

When it comes time for decolonization, we should respect the right of self-determination, and the colonized people should have a voice to decide what happens to a sort of post-colonization. your future. Democratic organizers protested every year after the handover. And from 1997 to 2002, protesters and the Chinese government seemed to be in a staring contest about who should be in control. This was a pile of political tinder that had been building in Hong Kong. And then there was a spark. A new piece of proposed legislation called Article 23 that would limit Hong Kong's ability to speak out against the Chinese government.

So in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the proposed law, including Jeffrey and his family. And in Article 23, there's this clause that says that it is the Hong Kong government's responsibility to enact national security legislation against things like sedition or treason. This proposed law, Article 23, is what turned a pile of political tinder colonization, decolonization with limited representation, and what many Hong Kongers felt was a lack of self-determination into a bonfire. It's been about 22 years since then.

22 years that have not been quiet in Hong Kong. And in that time, Jeffrey has become an activist organizer, has left Hong Kong, and he isn't sure if he'll ever be able to go back. Who knew if you could write something on Facebook and be like, I hate the national security law because it violates all the freedoms that we've enjoyed for years. The Chinese government should back up. Who knew if you wrote something like that, whether that could land you in jail for five or ten years, if not, you know, lie behind bars?

I'm Amory Sieverts. I'm Ben Brach Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Threat. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. And today we're telling you the story of Jeffrey Nau, as a way of telling you the story of how social media's role in protest and and oppression is evolving around the world and at home, wherever home is. Hong Kongers never had a true democracy. But what they did have, thanks to the one-party two-systems framework, was at least more democratic than mainland China. For example, the mainland

effectively has one political party, the Chinese Communist Party. Hong Kong had multiple. In mainland China, the government controls the media. But Hong Kong had an independent press and court systems that were independent from China. And crucially, they had the right to protest, which they did a lot. Every year on June 4th, Hong Kongers would honor the protesters killed at Tiananmen Square in 1989. They marked the anniversary with a vigil, a big symbol of their autonomy from the mainland, where you can't even acknowledge that the massacre happened. A few weeks later, on July 1st, the anniversary of the handover,

Hong Kongers would typically gather on the streets again to protest against any overstepping from China. They essentially had an annual protest season. Even though we weren't necessarily democratizing, we were at least somewhat preserving our way of life in terms of the ability to assemble and to protest. True to his seven-year-old self, Jeffrey stayed involved in these protests,

even after moving to the United States for college at NYU. And in his sophomore year, there was a particularly big protest. Part of the original handover deal between the UK and China was that eventually Hong Kongers would get to vote for their leader directly, unlike on the mainland. Remember, one country, two systems. But this hadn't happened yet.

Their leader was still selected by committee. Then in 2014, China's Congress voted that Hong Kong citizens could vote for their leader, but only from a list of candidates who were basically hand-picked by the Communist Party. This did not fly in Hong Kong. The pictures are simply incredible coming out of one of the world's major financial centers. Protesters planned to flood Hong Kong's Central District,

where most of the city's banks are located. Central is an important hub, not just for the city, but for the entire world, because Hong Kong's banks connect trade between mainland China and everywhere else. In the beginning, it was called Occupy Central. So it was inspired by Occupy in New York potentially? Tactically, yes.

But in terms of the ideological underpinning, I would say no, because it was not an anti-capitalist movement. It was much more that we wanted to do something disruptive. And what better way to do it in the middle of an international financial center than to literally stop traffic and pedestrian moving where the banks are, right? So that was the idea. The protests spread beyond the central. District and the banks.

Thousands of protesters, but tents and umbrellas flooded the streets. Whole swathes of the city came to a standstill. Something it's clear has got to give. These protesters aren't moving any time soon, and Beijing is unlikely to want to lose space by offering compromise. The protesters used umbrellas to shield themselves against the tear gas and rubber bullets from the police. As the story goes, this caused an American on Twitter to dub the protest

the umbrella revolution. A lot of activists in Hong Kong actually preferred to call it the umbrella movement because they weren't trying to overthrow the government as part of a revolution. They were just exercising the democratic rights promised to them during the handover. By 2014, Hong Kongers were protest pros.

This is the city where, like, middle school kids when they're like 13, 14 years old, would band together and show up at a protest against the high, you know, the public school curriculum. There's such a vibrant tradition of civil society, of protests, of organizing. But now there was a new tool at their fingertips, social media. Social media had already helped fuel the Arab Spring in 2011, and later that year, Occupy Wall Street in New York, which got a lot of attention. Including from the Chinese government, they were trying their damnedest to make

sure a protest movement like that didn't happen in China. They cracked down on internet access, limiting what sites everyday citizens could see and what news they could read and share on social media. This censorship is known as the Great Firewall. But because Hong Kong was somewhat autonomous, Hong Kongers had way fewer restrictions. They could get their message out on social media. And so, unlike in 2003, when the protests against Chinese interference were more a local story. People around the world were talking about the umbrella movement. There were Facebook groups, there were text message chats and so on and so forth, where, you know, you had people in Sydney, in Paris, in my case in New York and in Washington,

you know, people in Vancouver, in London, and so on and so forth. We all wanted to do something to support the protest back home. And most of that, if not all of that, occurred on Facebook. I mean, it was really we would create like a Facebook event. we would invite all our friends who were Hong Kongers in the city, and their friends would invite all their friends. And so in the end, we had like 300, 400 people come. The umbrella movement lasted for nearly 80 days. Organizers estimated that more than a million Hong Kongers participated at some point.

The protests did not result in fair and open elections for Hong Kong's leader. But they did get people even more energized in civic engagement. Some of Jeffrey's friends even formed a new political party, called Demasisto, derived from Greek and Latin words that mean, stand for democracy. Jeffrey was able to get involved from abroad. Once again, thanks, in part, to social media. Then, in 2019, another protest movement started simmering back home.

Tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong have taken part in a demonstration against a plan change to extradition laws. This time, the Hong Kong Legislative Council was proposing a law that would give the Chinese government more power to arrest Hong Kongers and extradite them to the mainland, to be tried in China's courts, which, to people in Hong Kong, did not sound like one country, two systems. Jeffrey flew home to Hong Kong in May. By then, organizers were reporting that hundreds of thousands of people had taken to the streets. And that was nothing compared to what happened next. The protests really broke out on June 9th. A city brought to a standstill to do.

by an enormous protest. According to estimates, one million people marched to Hong Kong's government headquarters in protest of the extradition bill. And many of them returned to the streets the next week. And the next. A summer of vacation and research turned out to be a summer of protest. This felt even more extreme than the umbrella movement did in 2014.

There were more confrontations with the police, but also more information. Once again, social media played a huge role in documenting the protests. And by 2019, the technology had advanced. Now, with a smartphone, almost anyone could live stream, as long as they had good cell phone service. And here's the thing about Hong Kong. They have excellent cell phone service, some of the fastest mobile internet connections in the world. And mainland China also had pretty speedy internet, but the mainland also had that restrictive, great firewall.

So in 2019, Hong Kongers could use the internet in a way that mainlanders could not to broadcast their political fights around the world. Whenever there's a protest that breaks out or like a confrontation between protests and police break out, you could just take out your smartphone, you could live stream that, and then mostly on Facebook and Instagram as well, and you would have thousands of views within minutes. I'm having dinner in between protests. I got to look out if the riot police is coming into the restaurant, but I also have like three phones.

One of them I'm looking at live streams on Facebook to see where the next protest is. One of them I'm looking at telegram channels and the other one I'm probably in like a bunch of signal groups with friends. And with my, you know, with people on my team and where are they? Are they safe? You know, it's just like there is the acceleration of the of the human experience in general, not just in terms of protest. But then when it comes to protesting, it's even more accelerated. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up day after day. They posted about the protests on Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, and also something called L-I-H-K-G, a Hong Kong-specific forum that Jeffrey describes as kind of a cross between Reddit and 4chan.

L-I-H-K-G has some sketchy stuff, but the anonymity helped fuel this, huge grassroots movement. There was a lot of initiatives spearheaded by an ominous online folks. And that largely occurred on that platform. In August of 2019,

it was time for Jeffrey to return to school in the U.S. I thought I was going to come back, you know, maybe in half a year, maybe like Christmas break, New Year's, or if not, at the very latest, the following summer, I did not know

that that was going to be my last day in Hong Kong. The day of Jeffrey's flight, August 23rd, is now known for something called the Hong Kong Way. Thousands of protesters made a human chain. Pretty much as far as the eye can see, stretching down one of the major roads here on the island of Hong Kong. It was more than 30 miles long. Chanting slogans like Free Hong Kong. Jeffrey was reading about it as his plane took off. And so that's the image.

he had of his home, his neighbors, friends, former classmates, all holding hands 30,000 feet below. It was such a strange moment in the protest because by that point there had been a lot of violence from the police and some of the episodes between the protesters and the police have been very, very confrontational. But that night was just so peaceful. And then everything from that point onwards, but I understood from a distance, and it was never the same for me again. Because of the live streams, Jeffrey was able to keep up with what was happening at home,

almost in real time. The protesters showed up weekend after weekend, going into 2020. They only petered out when COVID lockdowns shut down the city. Jeffrey decided not to make his annual summer return back to Hong Kong because of the pandemic. But he was still paying attention. and hearing rumors about a new law that would affect protests and free speech.

A new law more severe than anything that had come before it. Hong Kong was beginning to hear from like informal sources. There were rumors saying that the Chinese government wanted to implement something very drastic in Hong Kong. And we all were very, very unsure. More in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Science, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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the law just came into effect. The new law is known as the national security law. In the past, the Chinese government had tried to influence Hong Kong lawmakers to pass security legislation that would tempt down on any criticism of the Communist Party, going all the way back to seven-year-old Jeffrey doing just that with his family in 2003. But this new law was a mandate from Beijing, with no input from Hong Kong. The National Security Law established a separate commission in Hong Kong to deal with violations of the law, and allowed for trials to be held on the mainland. It allowed

for wiretapping and surveillance if you were even suspected of breaking the law. If you knew of somebody breaking the law, you were required to report them, or face up to 14 years in prison. Jeffrey and his friends had already been in a state of uncertainty while they waited for this new law to come down. When it finally did, there wasn't exactly a clap of clarity. I think the thing that shocked everyone when the text of being the National Security law became available was, first of all, how ambiguous the language was. In some ways, that was the scariest part. The law didn't specify exactly what type of speech or action crossed the line, leaving people to feel that almost anything political was now forbidden,

just like on the mainland, where protests are quickly squashed, and activists are often arrested and punished. One of the reasons we wanted to talk to Jeffrey was because his social media and online community was a really important part of his Hong Kong activism, especially because he spent so many years participating from halfway around the world. At this moment in 2020, he was awaiting this rumored new law that could affect how people protest. He had no idea how things might change. That feeling of uncertainty about when the government might react to what you do or say

might sound familiar if you're living in the United States right now. Increasingly, we are hearing stories about customs and border officials questioning American citizens when they re-enter the country about what they say online. In a few cases, they've requested to search citizens' phones and then have looked through their private messages. It's not exactly widespread, but it's enough to spawn dozens of articles and Reddit threads about how to stay safe. A lot of people are thinking about how to lock down their tech and social media in ways they just didn't before. People who aren't American citizens are even more confused about what they're allowed to say, even privately.

More than 1,500 students had their visas revoked in March and April. While hundreds of those visas have since been restored, many of the affected students say they don't know why they were targeted in the first place. As of this recording, the State Department has stopped student visa interviews while they expand its social media vetting process. The Department of Homeland Security has said it will continue to monitor social media to decide who can stay in the country and who has to go. We wanted to know how all of this unease will change how we talk to each other, especially online.

We can't see into the future. And yes, China and the United States are very different. But what happened to Jeffrey after this moment in 2020, with the threat of this new law hanging over his head, is kind of a window into how online spaces here could change. For Jeffrey, the minute in 2020 that the new national security law went into effect, everything started to shift. That was the day I left my organization, Demasisto, and then the group decided to fold a few hours later because it was just not viable with the sweeping language of the bill. All of the leaders of Democisto, the pro-democracy political party that Jeffrey helped organize,

resigned as well. Within hours, they had tweeted that the entire party was disbanding. You could feel it half a world away just by looking at the behavior online. Jeffrey said that before the national security law, all sorts of political organizations

used social media to get out their message. There would be like lawyers' concern groups, doctors' concern groups, teachers' concern groups. You had labor unions, you had political parties, you had teachers' unions. I mean, it was just such a vibrant scene. Now, there was a rush to pull anything that went against the new law offline.

Individuals were deleting their old political tweets and Facebook statuses, and organizations were just folding altogether. They would sort of put a statement on Facebook, on Instagram, press release, whatever, and then those pages would either stop updating altogether or they would just disappear. I don't want to say all of it.

that to say that Hong Kong just gave up overnight. But I would say, yeah, it was drastic. And it was, particularly jarring because Hong Kong had just for so long been known as a city of protest. I mean, this is the kind of city. This is one of the freest, if not electorally the most democratic place, for a long time, it was one of the freest places in Asia. And so to see all of that just sort of disappear overnight. because of the fear. I mean, that was really, really jarring. Can you say more about that fear, Jeffrey? Like, what is the danger for people posting about politics now? What are the consequences?

There were no legal presidents because it was just so new. And so for folks on the ground, it was like, okay, I'm going to be very careful with what I say in person and very careful with what I post online because if I do anything that apparently crosses the line, What if National Security agents knock on my door at 5 o'clock in the morning and take me away? There's no recourse. There's no frame of reference. I think that was the problem. People in Hong Kong don't know if a political Facebook post or a message will lead to a slap on the wrist or a long prison sentence. So they've just started to self-censor, which has totally changed the tenor of even casual group chats. I think we are all very politically aware.

where group of people. And so in the bygone days, that was whatever that was before 2020. I mean, it was very common for us to talk politics. I mean, it's just part of what Hong Kong people talk about or talked about. And we would make jokes. We would poke fun at the government. We would be sending political memes. And I think we continue to do that to one another among those of us who are abroad. But we don't. really do that to people in Hong Kong. Which brings us back to this original question we had. When people don't know if their words online will come with severe consequences,

how does online life change? When I go on Instagram and I look through the stories posted by my friends who are Hong Kongers, I mean, from one story to another, you could really tell who's where. If it's like remotely political, you would not see. someone in Hong Kong sharing that news on that story, if you see that news of like a protest of 3,000 people on the streets of London outside the Royal Mint Court in Tower Hamlets against the proposed plan to expand the Chinese embassy, 99% of the time that person sharing that story is a Hong Kong who's currently abroad.

In other words, if a friend posts something about Hong Kong, they're probably not in Hong Kong. Many of Jeffrey's former Demasisto colleagues live abroad, with exorbitant bounties for information leading to their arrest. Other activists have been arrested as soon as they landed in Hong Kong, sometimes for merely attending a protest, much less organizing one, in ways that reminded us of how the American government has detained foreign students involved in campus activism over the war in Gaza, even if they weren't particularly active in those protests.

Like in the case of Rumae-UZTurk, the Tufts graduate student who spent six weeks in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Ramesa has since been released, but she still faces deportation, all because of a single op-ed she wrote about Gaza for the tough student paper. For now, Jeffrey isn't interested in finding out whether or not he'll go to jail if he goes home. He's staying away from Hong Kong.

Now, I have to say that unless you're on some kind of wanted list or unless you have a bounty on your head, you don't definitively have proof that you can or you cannot go back to Hong Kong. And this is the level of ambiguity that the Hong Kong authorities operate on. Because if you don't know, then you might have to self-sensor if you still want to go back. Or if you don't know, then you might not go back and a certain level of the freedom of movement has been deprived. you accept that that is a part of your life before the national security law

that you're not going to get back. But then in exchange for that, there are certain things that you can do and say. Well, Jeffrey is doing research in London for the moment. He needs to come back to the U.S. That's because, in addition to his activism, he is finishing his PhD in history at Georgetown University. His dissertation is, of course, about Hong Kong,

in a global context. He's currently on an F1 student visa, the same type of visa that's been revoked in many recent cases. So he didn't feel comfortable talking about how now the American government is sowing uncertainty about what rights students like him actually have. But he did have some advice after a lifetime of activism. You can't tune out because once you do, once you decide that you're going to give up, you're not going to resist,

then it's much easier for those in power to win. Jeffrey is essentially living in political exile. The online political chatter that once fueled his activism is quieter now, that his friends at home are afraid to speak. No one is expecting Hong Kong to regain any sort of democracy soon or ever. And still, Jeffrey's not tuning out. Back in 2020, you told the Hoya, the Georgetown paper, in an interview, you said, quote,

I'm an optimist, not a naive one. I just believe that history moves generally towards more humanity. Do you still see things that way five years later? That's a good question. I think it's more difficult for someone like me to say that in 2025

because of the external circumstances. I don't want to, I don't want to lose the optimistic part of me but objectively speaking I think things have gotten worse I think we are in a more uncertain time politically

and so I would say it's more difficult but I wouldn't I wouldn't reverse what I said something seems impossible until it just happens right I mean as late as 1986 maybe even a bit of 1990 In 1987, it would have been crazy for anyone to predict the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet it did happen in 1991.

On the whole, if we zoom out and we look at the overall trajectory, I still believe that things will eventually move in a positive direction, even though right now, I mean, sometimes it's difficult to see. As this episode was being published, we were watching protests in Los Angeles, in support of immigrants, and against what protesters view, as the Trump administration's aggressive violation of non-citizen rights. And we were watching as those protests spread from Los Angeles to other cities around America.

If you have thoughts on how we should be talking about that, we are all ears. Get in touch. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by me, Amory Siebertson, and Ben Brock Johnson. It was mixed in sound design by Emily Jenkowski and edited by Meg Kramer. The rest of our team is Franny Monaghan, Dean Russ. Our production manager Paul Vykes and our managing producer, Sumitajoshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the online world and democracy.

If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org.