Winnie the Pooh is a fictional persona non grata on some Chinese social media sites, where censors are scrubbing images and mentions of the bear, NBC News reported.
On the popular chat app WeChat, stickers of Pooh and friends were no longer accessible, while Weibo no longer showed memes comparing President Xi Jinping to the bear.
That longtime meme is being blamed for the censoring in the absence of an official explanation. WeChat's developer declined to comment to NBC News.
"To ban Winnie because someone has compared him to Xi?" one student said. "What the heck, give Pooh and President Xi a break!"
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