New Report on Chinese Censorship

You can read the executive summary of a new report from Citizen Lab that characterizes censorship over live-streaming services, one of the most difficult challenges any government can try to tackle.  It is virtually impossible to real-time censor any content by running it through a central monitoring activity - though the Chinese certainly try.  What this report shows is that the Chinese decentralize live streaming censorship and embed key words in the filtering censorship software.  They leave actual censorship to the local entity - called self-censorship - and hold those entities accountable if they don't.  One example cited is the downloading of a VPN, which would give the user some security from this type of oversight.  I guess they don't need a policy that bans VPNs if they have thousands of service providers enforcing what they think that keyword might mean.

This is typical of the policies used by China on companies operating there.  The policies are vague, "draft", and enforced differently by different localities.  This creates doubt in the minds of those operating there and leads to over enforcement by self-regulators.