On Sunday's Last Week Tonight, Oliver spent 20 minutes delving into Chinese censorship, even bringing up the censorship of Winnie the Pooh because President Xi Jinping's critics have likened him to the cartoon character. Oliver even had kids sing about the resemblance, which Slate predicted "will surely be banned in China." According to the The New York Times, Oliver's name has been censored on the major social media platform Weibo. "Attempts to create posts containing the words 'John Oliver' on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform, resulted in an error message on Thursday saying the post may violate 'rules and regulations,'" reports The Times' Tiffany May from Hong Kong "Quite a few posts mentioning Mr. Oliver were visible on the platform, but none referred to the China episode, and the most recent had been posted a few days before it aired."
TOPICS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO, John Oliver, Censorship, Social Media, Weibo