The popular comedy “Friends”, first released on 22 September 1994, has become the most recent target of China’s censorship campaign.
A week ago several streaming platforms began broadcasting in the Asian country the series starring Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc , Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer, and the Chinese censors eliminated several scenes and altered references to a lesbian character.
Thus, on the iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Bilibili platforms, from which can watch the series in China, conversations about Ross’s ex-wife, Carol Willick, identifying as a lesbian are suppressed, as is a scene from another episode where two male leads kiss on New Year’s Eve.
The alterations to the plot provoked the anger of Internet users in recent days on Chinese social media, and the et iqueta #FriendsDeleted ended, with more than 60 million visits, as a trending topic with hundreds of comments that were deleted hours later.
“In his Most don’t want women in their own country to wake up,” one person wrote on Weibo. “They don’t want them to know that women can love women. Otherwise, who will help men carry on the family line?” reads another post.
A commenter noted that the “Friends” writers helped normalize the LGBT community with the episode: “And this is something that ‘Friends’ managed to do in 1994,” he said, questioning why homosexuality was being censored in China decades later.
“If you can’t broadcast the full version, it’s better that you don’t broadcast anything”, said one more.
Some Internet users even called for a boycott of the censored version and shared links to download the original series.
The Chinese government, which has a strong censorship system known as the “Great Firewall”, In recent years, it has strengthened its control over what is published on the network with several laws that prohibit Internet users from publishing content that violates “national honor”, “disrupts the economic or social order” or is intended committed to “overthrowing the socialist system”.