Can’t Take a Joke

The Chinese cannot take a joke, at least not one connected with a senior level bureaucrat and a famous female celebrity.  In an article today, the Wall Street Journal describes what happened to a construction supervisor who was chatting with some of his friends on WeChat.  He was arrested by the local police and held, without charge or trial, for 5 days.

The story is meant to show how censorship clouds even the most personal of conversations in China, but it shows much more too.  If we just look at Twitter, there are about 500 million tweets every day.  Just for fun, go to Internet Statistics  and watch how fast that causes the number to climb as the day goes on.  Now, imagine your boss says, “See if you can figure out a way to monitor and censor all the Tweets put out every day.”  It takes some thought to do that.

It requires algorithms, connections to telecommunications platforms all over the country, and human beings who can look at some of the things collected by algorithms in order to find out which ones are worth pursuing.  The algorithms look for key words in the content of the exchanges.  The content also has to have associations, i.e. more than one keyword is needed or there would be millions of chats that would have to be looked at.  We need both the bureaucrat’s name and his association with the celebrity.  That would then be passed to an analyst who would check it to be sure it was the association, and the analyst would make an alert to the local police.  The locals probably get hundreds of these a week, and have to prioritize them.  They get to them when they can, and may leave the guy in jail while they look around for the extent of his transgressions and his friends.  If this seems like a lot of trouble for a joke, it is.

Now, imagine what it is like to know those algorithms are running in the background of every Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube equivalents in China.  Every note you send, every exchange with a coworker or Facebook friend, even family members.  Say the wrong thing, and you can be spending a few days in the local jail, maybe not knowing what you are there for.  That is China.  Whatever kind of label you put on it, this is stifling, oppressive, and offensive to the dignity of our fellow man.