censorship

Censorship in China increases in wake of Liu Xiaobo's death: U of T's Citizen Lab

ullahnor — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 14:58:32 +0000

Censorship in China increases in wake of Liu Xiaobo's death: U of T's Citizen Lab

ullahnor Mon, 07/17/2017 - 10:58

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Protesters posted postcards to Liu Xiaobo earlier this month at the Chinese hospital caring for the cancer-stricken Nobel laureate (photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images)

Topic

Global Lens

Citizen Lab

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

censorship

internet

The ��Ƶ's Citizen Lab says the death of Liu Xiaobo last week led to increased censorship in China as people took to social media to express their grief.

The New York Times on Monday reported on Citizen Lab's latest censorship findings from China. The Internet watchdog group, located at the Munk School Global Affairs, says there was a “significant shift” in censorship techniques in the days after Liu’s death, particularly on two of China’s most popular platforms: WeChat and Sina Weibo.

Citizen Lab, which has extensively studied social media censorship in China, found that general references to his death in Chinese and in English, and even just his name, were blocked on WeChat. The group points out that this is the first time images – including photographs of Liu and of people commemorating him – were blocked in one-to-one chats, as well as group chats and WeChat moments.

Read Citizen Lab's full report

“Social media platforms in China regularly censor content related to Liu Xiaobo and his legacy including ‘Charter 08’ and being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as shown in previous research and user reports,” Citizen Lab reported. “However, the death of Liu marks a particularly critical moment for the Communist Party of China (CPC) and, as a result, Chinese Internet companies are facing direct or indirect government pressure to apply broad restrictions to content related to Liu.”

The report stated there are signs that a younger generation in China is slowly forgetting the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, and there's concern about whether Liu will meet the same fate.

Read former U of T expert on Canada failing to criticize China

U of T's Citizen Lab exposes censorship on popular chat app, WeChat

ullahnor — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 18:33:41 +0000

U of T's Citizen Lab exposes censorship on popular chat app, WeChat

ullahnor Thu, 12/01/2016 - 13:33

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WeChat is the most popular chat app in China (photo by Jiangang Wang via Getty)

Topic

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Faculty of Arts & Science

Researchers at the ��Ƶ’s Citizen Lab published a report today that reveals how WeChat, the most popular chat app in China, censors content.

The report shows WeChat has separate censorship policies for international users and those in China with the majority of censorship targeted for Chinese accounts. It also reveals that WeChat removed notifications to users about the blocking of chat messages on the platform.

The findings are making headlines here at home and around the world.

Read the Globe and Mail

Read Bloomberg

Read The Wall Street Journal

The researchers found that there is more censorship in “group chat” messages compared to one-to-one user chats, possibly due to concerns about posts being spread to larger audiences and leading to mobilization, and that WeChat’s built-in browser also blocks certain websites for both China and international accounts.

The researchers found 41 websites blocked exclusively for Chinese WeChat accounts, including online gambling, news and media websites that critically report on China and the website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which reported on the Panama Papers.

“Attention usually focuses on foreign companies attempting to reach into China and facing hard decisions over how to approach its strict content regulations. WeChat has the opposite dilemma. To gain wider success the app must maintain its base in China, all while staying within the Chinese government’s boundaries, and present a compelling experience to attract international users,” says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, research manager at Citizen Lab, which is located at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs.

Citizen Lab, which has extensive experience uncovering Internet censorship practices through network measurement and reverse engineering techniques, says the report shows the importance of understanding how apps work.

“Days are long gone when we used to interact with the Internet as an undifferentiated network,” says Professor Ron Deibert of the Faculty of Arts & Science, the director of Citizen Lab. “The reality today is that what we communicate online is mediated by companies that own and operate the Internet services we use.

“Social media in particular have become for an increasing number of people windows on reality. Whether, and in what ways, those windows might be distorted – by corporate policies or government directives – is thus a matter of significant public importance (but not always easy to discern with the naked eye).”

WeChat is the dominant chat application in China and fourth largest in the world with 806 million monthly active users. The application thrives on its huge user base in China, but like any other application in the country it must follow strict content regulations.

The report finds that WeChat enables keyword filtering for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. Remarkably, the researchers found that censorship stays on
even if users switch to a non-mainland phone number or travel to a different country – “locking in” users with mainland China accounts to its system of censorship no matter where they go.

“It’s unclear if the persistent content restrictions we've detected for China accounts is intentional, but the outcome is concerning. If you register a WeChat account to a Chinese phone number, you will always be under additional censorship even if you travel or later link your account to an international number. The idea that you can't escape a censorship system imposed on you at the time of registration is a troubling one indeed,” explains Jason Q. Ng, a researcher at Citizen Lab.

The researchers systematically tested a sample of keywords in two WeChat modes: one-to-one chat and group chat. They found a greater number of keywords blocked on group chat, which suggests that group chat is specifically targeted, potentially because of its ability to reach a larger numbers of users. Censored keywords spanned a range of content including current events, politics and social issues.

The report also found that censorship on WeChat is dynamic. Some keywords that triggered censorship in original tests were later found to be permissible in later tests. Newly censored keywords also appear to have been added in response to current news events.

“When you send a message on WeChat, it passes through a remote server that contains rules for implementing censorship. If the message contains a keyword or set of keywords that have been targeted for blocking, the message will not be sent,” explains Jeffrey Knockel, senior researcher at Citizen Lab.

The report goes on to detail how, in both one-on-one and group chat, censorship now happens without user notification. Previously if a user sent a message with a blacklisted keyword, a warning would pop up explaining the message could not be sent. Now messages are censored without giving any indication that they have been blocked.

“The removal of the censorship notices means WeChat has become even less transparent and also less dependable for its users in how it handles their communications,” says Citizen Lab researcher Lotus Ruan.

In addition to keyword censorship, WeChat implements a URL filtering system in its built-in browser. All of the sites that were exclusively blocked on Chinese accounts were fully accessible on international accounts without any warning page, but the researchers also found intermittent blocking of gambling and pornography websites on international accounts.

Unlike chat censorship, when a website is blocked on WeChat, a variety of explanatory messages are provided for why the censorship has occurred. However, it is unclear how accurately the purported explanations match up with the actual reasons for why websites are blocked. This ambiguity in attributing the source for the filtering again reflects the lack of transparency in how WeChat determines what “sensitive content” to block.

U of T researchers uncover hidden censorship on Chinese live streaming apps

lavende4 — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 13:48:38 +0000

U of T researchers uncover hidden censorship on Chinese live streaming apps

lavende4 Tue, 11/01/2016 - 09:48

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A group of women look at their mobile phones outside a mall in Beijing (Photo by WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images)

Topic

Global Lens

Citizen Lab

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Three hugely popular Chinese live streaming applications are being routinely censored, researchers at the ��Ƶ’s Citizen Lab have revealed.

The researchers at the Citizen Lab, which is based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, said that hidden keyword blacklists are used to censor chats on the live streaming applications: YY, 9158, and Sina Show.

Read the CBC coverage of the story

Live streaming applications have gained huge popularity in China in recent years, with millions of users flocking to them to share karaoke performances, game sessions, and glimpses of their everyday lives. However, the growing popularity of these apps has been met with increased pressure from the Chinese government to ensure real name registration of live streaming performers and censorship of prohibited content.

“Social media companies in China are held responsible and liable for content on their platforms, and are expected to control content, or face punishment from the government. Our research shows how this system works in practice,” said Citizen Lab Research Manager Masashi Crete-Nishihata.

The researchers reverse engineered the apps to discover how the censorship worked – taking apart the software and examining it from the inside-out. They found that censorship is done on the client-side, meaning all the rules to perform censorship are inside of the application running on your phone or computer.

“These apps have built-in lists of blacklisted keywords,” said Jeffrey Knockel, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab. “If you send any of these keywords, your chat message is censored. These keyword lists give a behind the scenes look into how social media is censored in China.”

The researchers tracked updates to the keyword lists over a year and found that new terms were often added in reaction to sensitive events. Overall, they found limited overlap in the blacklisted keywords used by the companies. These findings suggest that while the Chinese government may set general expectations about taboo topics, decisions on what exactly to censor are left primarily to companies themselves.

China has the most Internet users in the world and one of the strictest regimes of information control. This new report offers a nuanced and in-depth view of how social media is censored in this country.

“Many people believe China censors the Internet in a uniform, monolithic manner,” said political science expert Ron Deibert, a professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the director of Citizen Lab. “Our research shows that the social media ecosystem in China – though definitely restricted for users – is more decentralized, variable, and slightly chaotic.”

The report is part of the Net Alert project, an effort to make research on information controls more accessible.

Read the full report

U of T's Citizen Lab implicates Canadian company in Bahrain Internet censorship

lavende4 — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 14:19:48 +0000

U of T's Citizen Lab implicates Canadian company in Bahrain Internet censorship

lavende4 Wed, 09/21/2016 - 10:19

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Protest in Bahrain in June 2016 (photo by Sayed Baqer AlKamel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Topic

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Faculty of Arts & Science

Ron Deibert

Researchers at the ��Ƶ’s Citizen Lab found detailed evidence that the Kingdom of Bahrain is censoring access to the Internet using technology from Canadian company Netsweeper, Inc.

Internet censorship is growing globally, and many countries now block access to large swathes of Internet content for their entire populations. Some of these countries, like Bahrain, use Western technologies to filter the Internet, raising corporate social responsibility concerns about the provision of technology, such as that sold by Netsweeper, Inc.

“Bahrain is an autocratic regime, and one of the world’s worst offenders of human rights," said Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs. "Provision of Internet censorship services to Bahrain helps aggravate the Kingdom’s poor human rights record, and runs counter to the Canadian government’s explicit support of human rights online.”

Bahrain has been in a period of extended political crisis since a stifled uprising in 2011, and the Bahraini government has engaged in a series of repressive tactics against oppositional political figures and human rights activists, including torture, arbitrary arrests and the revocation of oppositional figures’ citizenship. Internet censorship is another means by which the government limits access to information and stifles freedom of speech, not just for activists or human rights defenders, but to everyone else in the country.

Read the Vice story on Netsweeper

Citizen Lab, which has been uncovering Internet censorship practices around the world and identifying the products and services used to undertake them, spent several months conducting the research, including a variety of in-country and remote network measurement and technical interrogation techniques. The group's latest report, entitled “Tender Confirmed, Rights at Risk: Verifying Netsweeper in Bahrain,” provides evidence that Netsweeper installations are present on nine Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Bahrain. Testing on one of these ISPs, Batelco, shows the Netsweeper installation is being used to filter political content, including content relating to human rights, oppositional political websites, Shiite websites, local and regional news sources, and content critical of religion.

“The sale of technology used to censor political speech and other forms of legitimate expression, to a state with a highly problematic human rights record, raises serious questions about the corporate social responsibility practices of Netsweeper, Inc,” the report says.

Read the Globe and Mail story about Citizen's Lab's latest findings on Internet censorship in Bahrain

The installations appear to have become active between May and July 2016, a few months after the release of a public tender by Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in January 2016 indicating Netsweeper won a bid to provide a "national website filtering solution," according to the report.

Netsweeper has a track record of providing Internet censorship services to countries with poor human rights records. Prior research by the OpenNet Initiative (2003-2013), of which Citizen Lab was a part, identified the existence of Netsweeper’s filtering technology on ISPs operating in the Middle East, including Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, and Kuwait. Citizen Lab also outlined evidence of Netsweeper’s products on the networks of Pakistan’s leading ISP, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), in a report published in 2013, and subsequently published research showing Netsweeper products were being used by three ISPs based in Somalia, raising questions about the human rights implications of selling filtering technology in a failed state. In a report on information controls in Yemen in 2015, Citizen Lab examined the use of Netsweeper technology to filter critical political content, independent media websites, and all URLs belonging to the Israeli (.il) top-level domain.

Included in some of these reports were letters with questions that Citizen Lab sent to Netsweeper, which also offered to publish in full any response from the company. Aside from a defamation claim filed in January 2016, and then subsequently discontinued in its entirety on April 25, 2016, Netsweeper has not responded to the Citizen Lab. Citizen Lab’s letter to Netsweeper concerning the use of its technology in Bahrain is available here.