Developers Offered $10,000 to Create Archive Tool for China’s Weibo on Arweave
To preserve content from Weibo, a social platform in China, anonymous backers from the Arweave ecosystem offered a $10,000 grant to anybody who will create an archiving tool like TwitAR that will support Weibo. TwittAR enables the direct storage of content from Twitter to the permaweb.
This action came after alleged attempts of the Chinese government to censor social media in an effort to mask the potential humanitarian crisis that is happening in Shanghai.
“We need to do everything possible to archive the history of these events.”
Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, wrote on Twitter while announcing the grant for developers to port the TwittAR archiving project to support Weibo, where many important records of these events are being shared.
.@ardriveapp is seeing a ~40x traffic spike China today, as this locally censored video is being shared: https://t.co/7a5hrJzFlL
We need do everything possible to archive the history of these events.
A group of anons from the ecosystem are now offering a $10k grant to devs…
— 🐘🔗 sam.arweave.dev (@samecwilliams) April 22, 2022
This comes after the apparition of a viral video titled ‘The Voice of April’ reported to be a compilation of voices of Shanghai residents complaining about the difficulties they are experiencing under the Covid-19 lockdown while the virus spreads.
四月之声－上海(英文字幕) 第一段
The Voice of April – Shanghai (Part 1 of 3)
转自油管：Masterchinesewithpeipei pic.twitter.com/93qAZnhShF— Dr. Yin 🇺🇸🇨🇱🇦🇪 (@DrZaneYin) April 24, 2022
Let me tell you a fact, we are in a severe shortage of wards right now. There are no rooms at quarantine centres and no available ambulances in hospitals.
“Give us supplies!” screamed another voice, reported to be from a compound in Gu village, Baoshan District.
Another voice, distraught with emotion, reported to be a phone conversation between a resident and the secretary of the community committee said:
I need the good policies from the above (Shanghai Government) so that I can explain and do something for you, but the reality is that there’s nothing. You know? No good policy at all. This work makes me exhausted physically and mentally
The video has been censored in China, although stored on Arweave’s permaweb through ArDrive. ArDrive, an app that enables files to be saved on the permanent web, had a 40 percent increase in traffic from China as the video was shared over the weekend.
Join our
