Saturday, May. 2, 2020
Did Chinese authorities place cameras at people’s front doors to ensure they stayed home during the COVID-19 outbreak?
To help manage the spread of COVID-19 in China, several Chinese cities implemented residential video surveillance to track people ordered to isolate themselves. The practice is well-documented through local government announcements and social media posts, though no reports indicate wholesale adoption across the country. Examples can be found in the cities of Qianan, Hangzhou and Changchun, where authorities also used automated detection techniques.
Sources
- City of Changchun: Video surveillance of quarantined residents (via Google translate)
- City of Qianan: Video surveillance employed for COVID-19 isolation (via Google translate)
- Weibo: Post about China Unicom installing video cameras in Hangzhou (via Google translate)
- CNN: China is installing surveillance cameras outside people's front doors
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
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