Founder of Protest Reporting Outlet Goes Missing in China · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

A photograph of demonstrations in Shandong province, posted on Twitter by Lu Yuyu. Photo via Weibo.
Lu Yuyu, founder of citizen media outlet Not in the News (非新聞), has been missing since June 15, along with his girlfriend.
The citizen news outlet has been reporting and distributing news of mass demonstrations in China via the Twitter account @wickedonnaa, Blogspot and YouTube since 2013.
The news team also keeps track of the scale and number of incidents, the number of arrested demonstrators and the reason behind the demonstrations through its monthly statistics report. It recorded 28,950 incidents in mainland China in 2015. The site recorded 9,869 incidents in the first quarter of 2016.
The site collects videos and photos of grassroots demonstrations from online sources and redistributes the news via various social media platforms. Twitter account @wickedonna is a major distribution spot and usually the account, managed by Lu Yuyu (Darkmamu), has several daily updates.
Since June 14, the @wickedonna account has posted no new updates. Lu's friend @youyuping alerted followers on June 20:
紧急寻人，这位敏感新闻自媒体 @wickedonnaa 失踪了。
— Pepee—皮皮游 (@youyuping) June 20, 2016
Urgently seeking missing person, @wickedonnaa, a highly sensitive news outlet [founder] has gone missing.
On Weibo, Lu's friend @ZGHQW99 is also looking for him:
卢 昱宇自11年来专业收集国内各种民间群体性事件，分别发布在他的新浪微博和推特上面，几年间从未间断过，让中外网友看到一个真实而苦难的中国。中国红旗网 《工农之声》版块也长期采用稿件。也一直上个星期，小卢突然失踪，至今无法联系到本人，连其家属的手机也突然处于无人接听状态，请各位多多关注！
Lu Yuyu has been researching mass incidents across the country since 2011 and distributing the news on Sina Weibo and Twitter. He has been doing this non-stop for years so that netizens from China and overseas can see people's suffering in China. Even [Party-affiliated] Hongqi's “Worker and Peasant” column has republished his writings. Last week, Lu went missing and out of contact. Even his relative's mobile phone is unanswered. Please pay attention to this.
In an interview with @beidaijin published on Paopao.net in 2014, Lu explained the mission of his work:
为抗争者放声助力，尽可能引起关注，将有效的抗争模式传递给更多处于近似境遇的人群以供参照。
To magnify the voices of the protesters and catch social attention. To spread people's experience of struggle so that others can learn from their successes or failures.
Lu began researching mass demonstrations and incidents in 2011 and began actively distributing the news through social media in 2013, developing what became a counterweight to China's online censorship regime. As witness accounts of protests are dispersed on social media and quickly deleted by web censors, Lu sought through his work to give people greater access to information of public interest and document a more complete picture of the incidents.
Lu Yuyu, the person behind @wickdonnaa. Photo from Twitter user @youyuping.
He usually spends eight hours a day tracking protest news on social media, cross-checking the information via different search engines, and verifying that videos and images are really coming from the protest spots. @hpgd0 praised Lu's work on Twitter after he learned about his disappearance:
非新闻每天替我们目睹了多少惨事啊。我光是想想都肃然起敬了。我自己经常会把头扭过去，不敢看别人的惨状的，但就看着他每天每天地记着账。这些新闻放在日本的话相信大多数都可以被作为新闻头版了吧，各种社会不公和法律不彰。一个社会确实不可能天生完美，但靠屏蔽负面新闻更不可能完美起来。
— 无名☂ (@hpgd0) June 20, 2016
“Not in the News” bares witness to so many sufferings for us. Putting such serious effort into this work is an act of respect. I sometimes intentionally ignore the news, as it takes courage to look at others’ suffering. But I notice that he keeps track of every incident, every day. These stories can make headline news in Japan, they are all loaded with social injustice. Society is not perfect, but filtering out negative news  will not make society better.
It is very likely that Lu and his girlfriend's disappearance is related to his citizen journalistic work. Many speculated that they have been detained because of recent protests in the town of Wukan, Shandong province, where protests have erupted over an ongoing land dispute. Xing Jian, an exiled dissident told Radio Free Asia:
乌坎事件再次持续升温，中国官方很有可能担心他们对乌坎事件会持续报道，所以人被失踪，也说明了中国政府对言论自由的进一步打压。我们呼吁国际社会及人权机构予以关注
As Wukan incident continued to gain public attention, the Chinese authorities are worried about media reports on the protest. That's why they made him vanish. This is a further suppression of freedom of press. We urge international society and human rights organizations to pay attention on this.