“It’s hard to run a sexual minority organization in China, and it’s also hard to run an internet company now,” said Chuncheng Liu, a PhD student at the University of California San Diego researching public health and the politics of algorithms in China. The message came amid a wide-reaching government crackdown on technology firms, which caused many of their stocks to go into free fall. In early July, Tencent suddenly erased over a dozen LGBTQI university groups from WeChat, sending an ominous signal about the future of queer activism that reverberated across the Chinese internet.