Applied Censorship

China has made censorship an art form.  In a special report from Citizen Lab, the folks at the University of Toronto have looked at censorship in China, and elsewhere, to see when and how it is being applied.  Their work looks at policy as it is being applied, and the technical aspects of how they do it.  They probably know more about Chinese censorship than most other institutions.

The latest from them has several notable areas of interest.  First, the application of censorship is not steady.  In the run up to the National Communist Party Conference censorship increased.  The China Digital Times described these activities as “wide-spread ‘lock-down measures that authorities are taking to secure economic, social and atmospheric stability during the highly sensitive political event.”  Those measures included a lot more than just censorship.  This is probably the best article I have seen lately on Chinese censorship and its releationship to national security, and well worth reading.

But Citizen Lab also looks at how these things are done - the technical aspects of how news and internal chats actually get censored.  Then they show how that policy is developed and applied.  The number of search terms and level of censorship actually increased in the run up to the NCPC.  New legislation pushes down the responsibility for censorship to the persons running the chat group, even down to the individual level in some cases.  They detained some dissidents and curtailed the activities of others.  If this sounds like harmony, then we are missing some important aspects of how to achieve it.

The U.S. election might have been a much happier event had we put these kinds of controls in place.  We could have closed Fox News down, driven out some of its reporters and contributors; we could have undermined the opposition candidates by filtering their messages in social media and press reports.  We could have used the national security apparatus to spy on opposition and feed that information back into the ruling government offices.  We could have manipulated polls to show only good results for our candidates and publicized those with the major news outlets.  We could have helped our candidates with money and resources while limited those of the small number of dissidents.

But, while we might recognize when these kinds of things are being done, the Chinese have added a layer of protection, forcing individuals to be responsible for the speech of people they associate with on social media.  This is the same thing the Russians did when they bought ads and funded fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but much more subtle.  Stir up trouble for the opposition was the Russian mantra, but the Chinese were better by eliminating any mention of them.  Those of you of follow these things know Russia has brought in the people who made Chinese censorship what it is.  They want to get better and know where the experts are.