Party and State: Chinese Government Censoring as Many Positive As Negative Comments Online

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Chinese Government Censoring as Many Positive As Negative Comments Online

It won't come as a great shock to long term China watchers that The Great Firewall is an annoying waste of time and money. The Chinese government considers controlling the Internet inside it's boundaries as a top priority and a major threat to its existence, as well as threat to the many web companies that pay good money to have western rivals blocked.

What might be surprising is new research that suggests the government is much more canny that we may have previously given them credit for. Lessons from the Arab Spring have taught the CCP that allowing criticism is ok, but posts that provide calls to action, which may even support the Chinese government are deleted.

The report, published yesterday by a group of Harvard students, also notes what some of us have known all along. Government rules are passed to individual ISPs and social networking sites, but it's up to the different companies to interpret the rules. Thus, not all censorship is born equal. The resultant effect is that that a "fuzzy line" is drawn, creating a panopticon, where it's not always possible to predict what will be censored and what won't.

Automatic review of posts made to social networks is an inelegant system badly implemented. At first glance, it looks like a good idea, but anyone who manages a website will know how quickly problems created by a bad word list can escalate into major catastrophes.

Search records from Google's time in China show that because of the Chinese affection for naming people using common nouns, it was possible for the character meaning "jiang" returned no results, at a time when rumors began swirling online about Jiang Zemin's declining helath, "jiang" made it to the bad word list. Unfortunately, since the same Chinese character can also mean "river", search relating to, say, the Yangtze Rive would also return no results.

Ultimately, people learn not to discuss even fringe topics concerning government policy, and stick to posting pictures amusing pictures of cats instead. The policy of publish first and review second will be familiar to those use regularly use Chinese social networking. Commonly known as being hairy crabbed, a nod to Hu Jin Tao's eupahism of "harmonizing" social media posts. The benefit of this system is that it allows people outside the sphere of Chinese influence to use API's published by web companies in order to present a "free" version of a censored social network.

For a revolution that was fought the in the name of the masses, the Chinese government seems to be hellbent on empowering the individual.