Censorship in China: A public-private partnership

While living for more than a decade in China and using its thriving social media, no question came to mind quite as often as this: “Who is the idiot who just censored that online post and what on earth was so dangerous about it?”

Needless to say, I was hardly alone in my frustration. While online social media has transformed civil society in China, creating an outlet for anyone with a computer to share views on entertainment (the most popular topic), sports and, of course, politics, most users have at one time or another come up against the limits of free expression on the mainland.

The one impediment to Chinese people connecting as a whole for the first time was, and is, their government.

HOW CENSORSHIP WORKS

As a group of Harvard University researchers showed in a study published in Science, however, responsibility for this state of affairs rests with social media platforms as much as the Chinese regime.

Censorship in China has evolved into a kind of private-public partnership, with the government setting the parameters and Internet companies free to “innovate” in finding ways to meet them — at their expense.

The system is a perverse form of blackmail: If the firms do not play ball, they risk attracting users who defy the state’s edicts on information.

The Harvard group used subterfuge to conduct their study, setting up their Internet bulletin board in China, where users could foster and engage in online discussions. The software to run the board did not include censoring tools (necessary if you do not want to be shut down).

So the researchers reached out to their Web-hosting company and found it “forthcoming when we asked for recommendations as to which technologies have been most useful to their other clients in following government information management guidelines”.

The researchers found that most Internet firms censor posts by curating sets of sensitive keywords (provided by government agencies, officials and common sense), which are fed into software that matches them to actual usage.

Posts that do not trip the keyword search are approved automatically; those that do are held for review (users are at times informed of this fact) or simply disappear. Similar filtering can be done by user or other criteria.

Not all of what the study discovered is new. In 2009, guidelines for Internet monitoring and censorship that paralleled much of what is in the Science paper leaked from Baidu — China’s top search engine.

More significantly, last year, Chinese state media reported that about two million people were employed in China as “Internet opinion analysts” — monitoring social media and reporting their findings to superiors. Though these analysts supposedly were not involved in censoring posts, it is unlikely that such a large army would be recruited for the purpose of passive observation alone. At a minimum, paying all these moles adds up to a serious expense for Chinese Web firms.

In the end, what is actually censored? To answer this question, the paper’s authors devised a way to view posts before they were eliminated. What they found is surprising: Posts critical of the government were no more likely to be censored than those supportive of it. Of course, this would be obvious to anyone who spends time on Chinese social media, where rants against the government are rife.

However, posts that hinted at “collective action” — meaning mass demonstrations, online campaigns and similar group political activity — were 20 to 40 per cent more likely to be censored than any others. Social media platforms are happy to provide a forum to talk about the government, but they will shut you down the moment you try to organise a get-together with like-minded individuals. And if you do not like it? Call customer service.

The result is a digitally connected China, where communications are hyper-modern and co-opted by the government. For a Communist Party interested primarily in the perpetuation of its power, the situation is ideal.

However, it means Chinese social media is doomed to remain compromised, suspect and, outside China’s borders, all too irrelevant. BLOOMBERG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Adam Minter is an American writer based in Asia, where he covers politics, culture and business.