Rogue Nation

Liu Xiaobo’s Death Pushes China’s Censors Into Overdrive
By AMY QIN

A vigil for the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on Saturday. China’s censors blocked images of Mr. Liu and of people commemorating him. 

BEIJING — It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of grief on social media that followed.
The accounts of censorship have been mostly anecdotal. 

But systematic research from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs shows that there was a “significant shift” in censorship techniques in the days after Mr. Liu’s death, particularly on WeChat, the popular messaging app from Tencent.
On WeChat, which has more than 768 million daily active users, the number of keyword combinations that were blocked greatly increased, according to the report that the Citizen Lab published on Sunday. 

Additions to the blacklist included general references to his death like “Xiaobo + died” in Chinese and in English, and even just his name “Liu Xiaobo,” effectively censoring any messages that mentioned him.
The Citizen Lab said it was also the first time that images were automatically filtered in private one-on-one chats on WeChat. 

Blocked images included photographs of Liu Xiaobo and of people commemorating him.

One of the distinguishing features of WeChat is that it does not notify users when their messages are blocked. 

The service also makes a distinction between accounts registered to phone numbers from mainland China and phone numbers from elsewhere.

In one experiment, researchers at the Citizen Lab found that a photo of Liu Xiaobo posted to an international user’s WeChat social media feed was visible to other users abroad but was hidden from users with Chinese accounts.
The heightened — yet uneven — censorship in recent days has elicited frustration and confusion among Mr. Liu’s supporters.
On the day after Mr. Liu’s death, one user posted on his WeChat feed: “‘Did you see what I just sent?’ ‘No, I can’t see it.’ For the last two days, this has been the constant question and answer among friends.”
The aggressive attempt at censorship is just the latest indication of the strong grip that the Chinese government maintains on local internet companies. 

In addition to automatically filtering certain keywords and images, internet companies like Baidu, Sina and Tencent also employ human censors who retroactively comb through posts and delete what they deem as sensitive content, often based on government directives.
Failure to block such content can result in fines for companies or worse, revocation of their operational licenses. 

Censors have been on especially high alert this year in light of the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall.
Over the years, the constant cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and internet users has led to the rise of a robust internet culture in which censorship is normalized and satire and veiled references are par for the course.
So even as censors stepped up scrutiny in recent days, many savvy Chinese internet users found ways to evade those efforts. 

In tributes to Mr. Liu, users referred to him as “Brother Liu” or even “XXX.” 

They posted passages from his poems and abstract illustrations of Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.
Over the weekend, however, the tributes gave way to scathing critiques as friends and supporters of Mr. Liu reacted angrily to the news of Mr. Liu’s cremation and sea burial under strict government oversight.
One user took to his WeChat feed on Sunday to express disgust with the use of Mr. Liu’s corpse in what some called a blatant propaganda exercise. 

“Swift cremation, swift sea burial,” he wrote. 

“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.”

China’s vast Internet prison

In law and in practice, China is creating the world’s largest online thought prison. 

The Washington Post

A live visualization of the online phishing and fraudulent phone calls across China. 

CHINA’S INTERNET is a universe of contradictions. 

It has brought hundreds of millions of people online and has become a vast marketplace for digital commerce, yet it is also heavily policed by censors to snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party. 

Under Xi Jinping, the censors are working overtime to keep 721 million Internet users under control.
The latest effort came Monday. China’s national parliament approved a cybersecurity law that can be used to restrict free speech and force foreign Internet companies to heed the demands of China’s security services. 

Censorship is not new in China; a huge phalanx of officials are devoted to it, harsh punishments are meted out, and the country is ringed by a content-blocking Great Firewall. 

But now censorship will be more fully enshrined in the legal code.
Article 12 of the new law prohibits use of the Internet for “inciting subversion of the national regime” or “the overthrow of the Socialist system.” 

Also banned is inciting separatism or ethnic hatred, “endangering national unity,” or “fabricating” or disseminating false information about the economy. 

These are all touchstones of Chinese authoritarianism, vague enough to be deployed in many circumstances to smother dissent. 

Article 37 of the new law requires “critical information infrastructure operators” to store users’ data, including that of foreign companies, on Chinese territory, making it easier for the security services to snoop. 

Article 24 requires Internet providers to demand the real identity of those they provide services to — making it easier for security services to track down those who would like to speak their mind. 

Many foreign businesses are also alarmed that the new law gives the Chinese authorities access to their technology and data.Offering a glimpse of how censorship actually works in China, Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, released a report recently on digital streaming services. 

Similar to Periscope (which is banned in China), these apps, such as YY, 9158 and Sina Show, have become a craze. 

Mr. Deibert’s researchers downloaded these three, and between February 2015 and October 2016 extracted 19,464 keywords that trigger censorship on chats associated with each application. 

Rather than monolithic control, they found censorship is decentralized and somewhat chaotic; the platforms are often expected to adhere to a kind of “self-discipline” rather than direct orders. 

Mr. Deibert’s group discovered that the most popular app, YY, with 844 million registered users, automatically sends a report back when a user types a banned keyword; the report includes not only the user’s name but also who the message was sent to and the message itself.
In law and in practice, China is creating the world’s largest online thought prison. 

It turns the idea of the Internet as a force for freedom on its head, and as China goes, so go other tyrants. 

From Vietnam to Saudi Arabia, from Russia to Turkey, the age of Internet repression has blossomed.