Inside China's censorship machine

CAMOUFLAGE

By Rebecca MacKinnon, National Post January 27, 2012

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the "China Internet Self-Discipline Award." Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering "harmonious and healthy Internet development." In the Chinese regulatory context, "healthy" is a euphemism for "porn-free" and "crimefree." "Harmonious" implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.

China's censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the "great firewall" of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw. org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, "This page cannot be found." This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight "gateways," which are easily "filtered." At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers - the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks - are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China's 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions - still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the "great firewall."

Fortunately for the government, there are plenty of social networking platforms and other delightfully entertaining and useful services on the Chinese Internet to keep people occupied, without much need to access sites and services based overseas - assuming they have no interest in politics, religion or human rights issues. Baidu, the homegrown search engine, enables people to locate all the content on the Chinese-language Internet that their government permits. The social networking platforms RenRen and Kaixinwang substitute for Facebook. People can blog on platforms run by Chinese companies like Sohu and Sina, which also runs a wildly popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo. QQ, run by the company Tencent, offers instant messaging, gaming and all kinds of interactive services that work seamlessly across both PCs and mobile phones.

These companies have all benefited from substantial Silicon Valley investment over the past decade, and many are listed on U.S. stock exchanges or others outside of China. Thanks to the many Americans who find China's rapidly growing Internet market to be an irresistible investment opportunity, these companies are well funded to provide highly entertaining and useful - albeit censored and heavily monitored - content and services.

These domestic companies are the stewards and handmaidens, the tools and enforcers, of China's inner layer of Internet censorship. Why simply block content when you can delete it from the Internet for good? Why hire government employees to carry out censorship and surveillance when companies can be compelled to do it? The government requires companies operating inside China to use a combination of computer algorithms as well as human editors to identify objectionable material and remove it from the Internet completely. Companies that fail to obey government orders face different grades of punishment: from warnings or stiff fines to temporary shutdowns or revocation of the company's business license. Many thousands of Chinese websites and dozens of companies have been shuttered because they failed to control their content adequately.

This requirement of cor-porate self-censorship applies to all Chinese websites, from small online communities to the largest commercial sites, like Baidu. It also applies to all foreign Internet companies with operations inside China - including Google.cn before Google decided to pull out.

Google's experience with Chinese censorship helps illustrate how these different layers work. Before it entered China in 2006, Google operated outside the "great firewall," which means that it was subject to blocking by the Chinese network. For example, if one were on the Internet in China and typed the Chinese characters for something politically uncontroversial, say, "automobile," into the search box on Google.com, everything would work fine. But if you tried to search for anything politically sensitive - such as the Chinese phrase for "Tiananmen Square massacre" or something related to politically sensitive breaking news, like the name of a city where a riot had just occurred - the page would be blocked. The page existed on a server overseas, but it could not be viewed in China. In other words, the search was blocked not by Google but by Chinese network engineers.

Then in 2006, Google decided that subjecting users to the inconvenience and frustration of such increasingly frequent blockages was not the best way to attract Chinese Internet users to its search engine. So they launched Google.cn inside China, agreeing to abide by the Chinese government's censorship requirements. To gain permission to operate from within the firewall, Google had to agree to adjust its search algorithms so that results on Google.cn would not include websites blacklisted by the Chinese government. Rather than get a blank page when searching for the Chinese name of a city where a riot had recently been put down by police, users of Google.cn would get a sanitized set of search results about that city, minus web pages containing reports from human rights and dissident websites.

After Google announced in January 2010 it was reconsidering its business in China, then pulled its search engine out of China in March, the government imposed strict media controls on the story. As a first line of defence, the "great firewall" blocked overseas Chinese-language news reports about Google's decision to remove its search engine. The government also deployed a range of offensive tactics: All blog-hosting services, microblog platforms and social networking services operating inside China were required to censor what Chinese Internet users said about Google. Authorities issued specific instructions to spin and manipulate the domestic media, in an aggressive effort to shape public opinion about what had happened. Not that people could not say anything: they were free to show Google in a negative light, and there were plenty of Chinese Internet users happy to trash Google, as there are all over the world.

But Chinese bloggers and social network users who expressed sympathy for Google's situation quickly found their postings deleted and blocked by all Internet companies - domestic and foreign - operating inside China. Writings by liberal-leaning people who argued that the free flow of information would be better for China's economy and that censorship only makes it harder for the Chinese government and people to resolve problems were also deleted. The government's State Council Information Office issued a direct and detailed order on the subject to all websites and news organizations. A Chinese blogger obtained the full text and posted it online. Here is a portion of that text, translated by the California-based website China Digital Times, run by the exiled activist Xiao Qiang: 1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.

2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top.

3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.

4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.

5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions.

6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents [the Chinese euphemism for "protests"], please report it in a timely manner.

Such directives are common, forcing Internet companies to maintain entire departments full of people whose job it is to respond to them. In late December 2010, Wang Chen, deputy head of the Communist Party's propaganda department and chief of the State Council Information Office - two of several party and government bodies in charge of Internet censorship policies - boasted in a speech that 350 million pieces of "harmful content" had been deleted from the Chinese Internet over the course of one year. Earlier that year, in a presentation to top government leaders, Wang gave a detailed description of an Internet "management system that integrates legal regulation, administrative supervision, industry self-regulation and technological safeguards." Some sections of his speech (the full text of which was leaked to the New York-based group Human Rights in China) were deleted from the publicly released version. One of these deleted sections, which the government did not intend to share with the public, said:

"We are following the overall thinking of combining Internet content management with industry management and security supervision; combining prior review and approval with supervision afterwards; combining technological blocking with public opinion guidance; combining hierarchical management with local management; combining government management with industry self-regulation; and combining online monitoring with offline management."

In such an environment where search engines and social networking services are so heavily censored, most people are not even aware of the existence of many facts, incidents or ideas unless somebody they know who is technically savvy enough to access uncensored online spaces happens to email a link to them. People who use domestic email services and social networking platforms to disseminate such information, of course, are subject to monitoring and potential arrest. Data-mining software and "deep packet inspection" technologies make it easy to automate surveillance through the Internet service providers and mobile carriers of all unencrypted Internet traffic no matter what service is being used or where it is based.

In 2011, the government moved to extend these censorship and surveillance mechanisms, as well as to improve their coordination. In March 2011, spooked by the Arab Spring, the central government established a new overarching government agency responsible for controlling all Internet platforms and services. The number of censored foreign websites, social networking platforms, and even data-hosting and "cloud computing" services expanded dramatically. Surveillance systems were upgraded to more aggressively track and identify Chinese citizens who managed to circumvent the blockages to use tools like Twitter. It became commonplace for Twitter users to be questioned about their postings, and at least one person was arrested for no other reason than a tweet she had sent out.

Twitter confuses the Internet with censorship options

A new functionality could allow Twitter to censor tweets based on country, users ask why now 

There is just no use trying to censor the Internet. Even as Twitter tries to backpedal from its position that it is a free-flowing marketplace of ideas, the Internet pushes back with ways to get around any filtering that may occur.

Thursday afternoon, Twitter blogged that it would bend on its open information ethos for countries with different ideas about expression.

Stating that they give themselves "the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."

This is a strictingly different position than the statement a year ago that stated: “The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact … almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.”

Many are seeing this change of positioning as financially motivated and could tarnish the Twitter brand, and ultimately create a chilling effect on the communication through the site.

Earlier this month, Twitter also was absent from much of the action in solidarity against SOPA when thousands of sites went black and other ingrates literature and videos about why SOPA would hold the communication and function of the Internet back.

This new option of censoring content based on country wouldn't ban a tweet from all of the Twittervese, but rather would filter what people in a given country could read, likely informing a reader or tweeter that this content is not able to be viewed in 'X' country. 

Likely posted as: “Tweet withheld,” it would read “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country.”

While they have not yet used this functionality, the company sees this as a middle-ground for countries that are still outside the Twitter-world, such s China. 

While Twitter was expressing its standing behind this compromise for countries that have different expression rights that the U.S., Internet activist were researching how to bypass this possible roadblock. 

The Next Web is one publication that has offered solutions to this censorship if the functionality is activated, but few people want a work-around, they want to know what is really motivating the company to change its postion on Internet speech.

Before this announcement, Twitter has deleted tweets based on content -- rather than limiting who can see it. Such deletions were most often requested by U.S. government agencies that expressed legal issues with the postings.

How China factors into this

Twitter has been expanding at an ambitious rate and they want to enter more global markets, but countries such as China have refused to host the company unless censoring measures can be made -- currently a Chinese company hosts most of the microblogging in China, called Sina Weibo. 

In November, a study showed just how much Chinese business people like to microblog. China has become a major consumer of online content -- now with well over 485 million Internet users (23% of the people scanning the Web) -- and now it seems that the country that has been slow to integrate social media, has made progress.

A study released by the PR Newswire stated that Chinese companies have adopted more elements of social media, such as microblogs, but they have a ways to go before they catch up to the reliance that U.S. companies have on social networking.

A significant 87% of the more than 1,200 respondents said that they used social media on a daily basis, but the frequency and type differed greatly across the sample.

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the blog post said. 

This possible change has all the elements needed for a hot Internet debate about cherry-picking company values. When Twitter entered the Web environment in 2006, the company standpoint was that everyone should have access to their own soapbox and get access to a place where people can listen. 

It wasn't even that long ago that a Chinese woman was jailed for a tweet. November, 2010, Cheng Jianping, a 46-year-old human rights activist in China, was sentenced to one year of re-education in a labor camp. And the tweet wasn't even hers, it was just a re-tweet. And the author of the tweet, Cheng’s fiancé, Hua Chunhui, was not arrested.

While Cheng was charged with disturbing social order, human rights groups contend that she was arrested for her activism and her known support of Liu Xiaobo, the human rights activist, author, and professor who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in early 2009.  Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, much to the Chinese government’s dismay.

The offending tweet originally sent by Hua was a jab at young Chinese nationalists who had gone on a destructive spree, smashing Japanese products in protest over a maritime conflict between China and Japan regarding the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.  "Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by [activist] Guo Quan. It's no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you'd immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion."

Twitter shifts its position

Last year, Twitter posted a blog that seemed unwavering in its belief in free speech, "For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content."

But now it looks like bringing in revenue and the race to the biggest usership may have tainted this -- or perhaps nievity instigated the brash statements in the past. Whatever the motivation, Twitter users and Internet activists will be voicing their concern over this issue in coming week and month, especially if this results in a ticket of entry to China.