As a user of the Chinese social media such as Sina Weibo and Wechat, I often witness the censoring process taking place on these platforms. From the most basic, words like government, name of president Xi, high officials, Communist party, etc. cannot be mentioned in posts. If you do try to post posts containing sensitive words the platform will alert you that your post contains "illegal" materials and it cannot even be posted. Netizens then use pinyin abrreviations, or memes to refer to these sensitive words. There is no limit to people's humor and creativity,and in fact, sometimes it goes overboard. It seems like Chinese people can joke about everything. Everytime a big event happens, memes and puns and jokes about it sprun over the internet, and eventually, people just laugh about it, forgetting what was really important about the event. I think apart from cencorship, governments try to distract people's use of internet and social media by stuffing them with cheap entertainment materials, so that people focus on being entertained, or criticizing how bad the entertainment was, instead of thinking about more serious problems. Nowadays, Weibo and other social media have become platforms of "becoming rich overnight", where popular bloggers earn millions of dollars just by posting jokes and imbedded ads.
I was especially disappointed when after Brexit votes and US Presidential election, propagandas about how democracy is not practical and a joke appeared all over Weibo. People are again, laughing and joking about the situation, and persuading themselves that totalitarian government is great, democracy is not working, etc., instead of critically thinking about it. However, since Chinese internet is a one-way firewall, these social media platforms are also the only way people can access free information and thoughts not promoted by the government. These social media will step by step, let people see, and think about the world outside of the great wall.