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The hong kong police had to release this statement recently:

HKPF reminds the public that the following websites are not the official Hong Kong Police Force website.

1. 96o.1ss5623.com 2. joshhyoung.icu 3. amylfraser.xyz 4. tiaflowe.icu

these examples look ridiculous but you have to remember that people are used to chinese characters and can't easily recognize if a url written in latin characters is right or wrong. this is made even worse by the fact that even official websites are not always hosted on an official domain, and even when they are they use ridiculous hostnames, because again whoever is setting up the site just sees a sequence of letters that they are not closely familiar with.

There is that and there is the fact that 50-60 years ago China was coming out of a Cultural Revolution that had shut down the education system, and places like Shenzhen were fishing villages with dirt roads well within living memory.

It is not exactly surprising that in such a breakneck development pace that some people did not get up to speed at the same pace.

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I will also say I think that China’s embrace of super apps and the quasi-app-internet is not helping with online literacy.

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