China Is Censoring People's Chats Without Them Even Knowing About It (qz.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A new study from The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, reveals that censorship on WeChat occurs primarily in group chats rather than one-on-one chats between two people, and often in such a way where the sender of a text isn't even aware a piece of text has been scrubbed. The discoveries illuminates how China's government attempts to keep its citizens blind to the scope of its censorship regime. The researchers set out find the extent to which certain keywords got scrubbed from conversations between two or more users in WeChat. To do this, in June 2016 the team posed as a Chinese WeChat user and sent out 26,821 keywords containing terms that had been censored on other apps, including Tom-Skype (a made-for-China version of Skype) and YY (a live broadcast app). A corresponding Canadian user in the two-way chat would then report back to say whether or not the message had been received. The report states that out of the entire sample, only one term -- Falun Gong -- had been scrubbed. When they ran an identical test in August, even that text mysteriously passed without censorship. Yet when they tested group chats, they found multiple cases in which certain keywords triggered a removal. Specifically, while sensitive terms used in isolation were unlikely to trigger censorship (say "June 4th," a reference to the Tiananmen Square protests, brutally put down on June 4, 1989), it took effect when they were used in a full sentence or with other keywords. The researchers also discovered that when WeChat censored a message, the sender received no notice informing him that his text had not reached the intended recipient. The study also notes that "WeChat only censors content for users who bind their account to a mainland Chinese phone number when they first register to use the app." The censorship is still applied even if Chinese residents move to different countries or change phone numbers.
Wait for Patriot-Skype (Score:5, Funny)
The words "orange" "tiny" and "bankruptcy" will all similarly be removed without any notice.
Re:Wait for Patriot-Skype (Score:5, Funny)
The words "small hands" is missing from your post. It must have been censored already.
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Ironic given that we don't have any examples of this happening in the real world, but we have countless examples of Google, Facebook, and Twitter censoring content that wasn't favorable to Hillary Clinton. Not to mention all the talk of banning "fake" news sites with all the Orwellian censorship of letting government and big corporations decide what's fake, and therefore invisible to you and I.
Not first! (Score:2, Funny)
The real first post was censored.
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It's spelt "Britain", genius. And we plan to modify the filters to censor posts by lamebrains who can't spell, thus improving the quality of discourse on the Internet a thousandfold.
You're welcome.
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when is brittain planning to copy this one?
Maybe they could add a spelling corrector while they're at it.
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Paul Brittain? From Saturday night live? Yeah, they're trying to censor him too!
Censorship on the march (Score:3)
Well, Twitter is already doing it [wikipedia.org], in America too [thegatewaypundit.com] — an early bird, so to speak. But, hey, they are a private company, so we have no need to worry, right?
Well, the new generation of citizens is being accustomed to censoring [washingtonpost.com] selves [theatlantic.com] and others [wnd.com] in colleges — including professors [theatlantic.com] — so, in 10-20 years, you'll have it world-wide, US and other elements of the British empire included.
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According to Snopes they have balls.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/jo... [snopes.com]
Evolution - (Score:5, Funny)
1: Censors remove all references to June 4th, no matter what context
2: Any plans for business to take place on June 4th disappear
3: Eventually nothing gets done on June 4th because nobody can plan for it
4: It turns into a holiday, and nobody can remember why.
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1: Censors remove all references to , no matter what context
2: Any plans for business to take place on disappear
3: Eventually nothing gets done on because nobody can plan for it
4: It turns into a holiday, and nobody can remember why.
Interesting...
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Surprised it took them this long (Score:5, Interesting)
Some 15 years ago I ran a messageboard for a popular game. It suffered from some persistant trolls and spammers. When they were banned they would come back with a new account, all the time from different IP's. After some time I made it so that instead of blocking access for the banned accounts or IP's, I hid their posts for all other users. Some clued in, but it did work against most. Later I made it so that the moderators would still see the banned posts and I asked them to "feed" the trolls, to make it harder for them to realise something was wrong.
It was quite a lot of work to adapt the code, but it was an interesting experiment. I always thought it would be a quite useful tool for bigger sites, so I'm surprised I never saw it used anywhere else.
Re:Surprised it took them this long (Score:5, Informative)
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Awww, you provided the trolls with a nice safe space of their own. (What you describe is known as shadow or stealth banning [wikipedia.org].)
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You should've made all the troll accounts to be able to be talk to each other while hiding them from the rest, that way the mods wouldn't have to feed them.
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Beehive Forums has this feature. It has a "worm" mode function where if a user is flagged with that, they can see all their posts... but nobody else can. It is similar to Reddit's shadowban.
It works well, because instead of the troll creating yet another sock from a different IP, they will spew their nonsense all over the place, and nobody will be the wiser.
I've wanted a feature where an admin could post with a flag where only admins and the troll could see the reply, mainly to keep the troll interested i
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I hid their posts for all other users. Some clued in, but it did work against most. Later I made it so that the moderators would still see the banned posts and I asked them to "feed" the trolls, to make it harder for them to realise something was wrong.
The sneakier tactic is to go the full hellban and make the hellbanned people visible to other hellbanned people. That way the trolls have lots of fun trolling each other and get lots of responses and never notice that the rest of the forum is blissfully una
Opening themselves up for copyright lawsuits (Score:2)
Wasnt that a feature another messenger had already implemented here in the US?
I faintly recall that mentioning the name of the competing product would cause the message to not be sent and some URLs to be rewritten.
Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of that messenger. Was it Skype? Whatsapp?
Incorrect (Score:2, Interesting)
Not everything about the Chinese internet is "say something wrong and you'll immediately be sent to a labour camp". Letting people vent but limiting their effective range to zero is much more efficient at quieting dissent.
Even the US government is trying very hard to follow in China's footsteps.
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Even the US government is trying very hard to follow in China's footsteps.
Are you certain it's not the other way around? Even a powerful, centralized, government like the one in China can only run around and stomp the boot on so many necks.
How they must marvel at the western democracy that mostly allows for free speech, and yet the rich and powerful keep their things and power.
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Free speech is one thing the US has in abundance. You can say pretty much whatever you want and the worst that will happen is that people will turn on you and exercise their power of speech back at you. It might cost you your job in certain incidences but you can be sure the government really isn't paying any attention to it. The government really doesn't give a shit what you have to say.
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You know, I'm not a big fan of Trump. He's got tons of flaws and does and says crazy shit pretty regularly. Still, he's just the President. He's got some power and influence but ultimately everything he does has to go through Congress and then the Supreme Court has a shot at making sure it's in line with the Constitution. One thing justices appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations have in common is that they support free speech. They do this because the First Amendment to the Constit
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Trump didn't get elected because of his views as much as the fact he was not Hilliary. It was entirely a negative campaign. Some people voted for Trump but most were just voting against Hilliary and the perceived establishment. You hear some crackpots for sure but when you ask them very few of his supporters really believe he's going to build a wall or even care about a wall. I'm not happy about the anti net neutrality people he's appointing either but in the end I think Mr. Trump is going to find out a
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That is very similar to our situation in the US. We need to wait for the baby boomers to vacate positions of authority, then
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... We need to wait for the baby boomers to vacate positions of authority...
That waiting does things to the next generation. It makes them start feeling entitled to occupy the positions held by the previous generation. Change happens when someone grows a pair and rebels against their parents.
Censorship (Score:2)
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You fucking idiot. The very fact you can come on this blog and spout your brainless drivel makes you a liar.
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You fucking idiot. The very fact you can come on this blog and spout your brainless drivel makes you a liar.
Hush! You were supposed to tell him his ideas are intriguing and try to subscribe to his newsletter. Dammit, you might have scared this weekend's entertainment away. I wanted to find out his views on the dildobergers.
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So...like Reddit then? (Score:2)
Just sayin.
Additional mandatory text to let me post.
Since when did the West prototype this shit? (Score:2)
I find it instructive that "shadowbanning," a tactic already in use by Twitter and Reddit, has been adopted by a Communist dictatorship.
Time for a re-evaluation.
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I find it instructive that "shadowbanning," a tactic already in use by Twitter and Reddit, has been adopted by a Communist dictatorship.
It gets worse! You know what the Chinese censors eat? Food. You know what the reddit AND twitter admins eat? Also food. I think it's also instructive that both also do their censoring on IP based networks. Will the similarities never end???!?
IOW Holy false equivalence, Batman!
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Don't the Chinese have the concept of codewords? (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that these simple keyword filters have much effect IRL, they'd be trivially defeated by codewords which would be easy to update when the codewords get banned. Here are some freebies in case they're needed:
Falun Gong = Fallen Gong
Southern Weekend = Leftymag
Tiananmen Square / June 4th Incident = Shoot n' squish day
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That's why they don't let the sender know they've been blocked. It takes longer before they realize that their messages are blocked.
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Animals censored in China (Score:3)
The grass mud horse [wikipedia.org] and the river crab [wikipedia.org] can be censored in China.
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People need to use ordinary and common words and phrases to have special meanings only intelligible by context. So if "Work" means Fulung Gung, and "the Party" means Tianomin etc. it becomes very difficult for any automated algorithm to know if "Work has been tough lately" is political or not. The algorithms will start to filter the chaff. Of course China has thousands (millions?) of human censors as well, but they will also be confused. And innocent messages will be interpreted by their receivers as p
I did not have textual relations with that woman (Score:2)
If you can censor conversations by muting specific words, can you replace those words as well?
*shudder* ...
The year 2016 appears to be ending in utter despair for those who believed in the idea of internet freedom with mass take-downs, bulk data collection, extreme state sponsored censorship , authorized government hacking, privacy erosion, porn restrictions, huge curtails on freedom of speech, all happening with greater frequency and intent.
The most ironic thing about the above, is that this is all happeni
This is the same way everywhere (Score:1)
As long as we depend on the ISP, we are all being censored without even knowing it.
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You're funny. Too bad you misread my post...
And still less creepy than Reddit (Score:2)
At least the Chinese don't EDIT what you write. Reddit putting words in your mouth is literally "next level shit".
Playing the devil's advocate (Score:5, Interesting)
As a western liberal I of course object censorship in all of its forms, but at the same time I understand the mindset that the Chinese establishment has: they cannot prevent the inevitable spread of communication technology, so more and more Chinese people are becoming networked. This means that the potential for massive protests of millions of people over any number of subjects ranging from food prices to air quality to an outrage over public transit prices [reuters.com] can occur more and more easily as these ideas are free to spread.
Take something like the 2013 Turkey protests [wikipedia.org] as an example. The estimates of how many people were on streets ranger from 3,5 to 7,5 million people. As I was in a relationship with a Turkish woman at the time, I know the effect social media had. People were sharing the locations data with each other; locations of other protesters, riot cops, locations of where to get gas masks/first aid, and in general coordinating the movement of the masses to try and evade the rather over the top fascist measures that the government pretty much immediately chose to resort to. Now 3,5 million people is a lot, but percentage-wise it's less than 5 % of the total population. China has approximately 721 million online users [internetlivestats.com] and growing. Even if only 0,5 % of that population gets together and starts organizing protests movements, we're talking about over 3 and a half million people, around the same scale as the protests in Turkey.
From the perspective of the Chinese government the situation is tricky: lowering censorship would be a good PR move and make people happier, but it has the potential to trigger situations in which Tianmen square will look like a peaceful and orderly event. The path of least resistance is thus to allow people to yell about their dissatisfaction online, but just make sure the information never reaches a critical mass of people to trigger major social instability and havoc. Put another way: giving total freedom of communication to the Chinese people has the possibility of sending the country into major internal turmoil, possibly even civil war, because the internet can be used - both by ethical and unethical instances - to leverage the power of the mobs at much faster speeds than any other communication technology up until this point.
From this perspective I understand why they're doing it, even though I do not condone it.
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...so the root of your argument is that the Chicom government HAS to resort to somewhat oppressive measures in order to prevent chaos.
You conveniently skip over the impetus for that chaos: oppressive government. What you have here is a policeman getting angry the political prisoner won't stop writhing in pain and comply with an arrest while they're beaten for resisting arrest. The failures and transgressions and abuses of power of the state never even get called to account for being the source of the whol
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There's two mentalities here, first is the elitist 'dissent is a crime that cannot be tolerated', which is a heavily disguised 'fuck you, I got mine'. Then there's distrust and downright contempt for the government. These create a negative feedback loop cementing each side's perspective as the victim. Many Asian countries seem peaceful but these triggers for civil war and totalitarian oppression lurk just below the surface.