Chinese online censorship targets "collective action" posts

We all know that China and the Internet aren’t exactly BFFs. The Great Firewall of China has been around for over 15 years now, and it shows no sign of crumbling. For years, it’s been conventional wisdom that the Chinese government does not tolerate online speech against the state and that Beijing employs a massive surveillance, filtration, takedown, and propaganda regime to counter all that happens online. Indeed, this week, Chinese network engineers outlined a policy to create new independent root DNS servers that would allow the country to control its domestic Internet even further—a policy that is highly unlikely to come to fruition.

But new academic research from Harvard published Monday suggests that China’s filtration policy may be more complex, and oddly, more open than had been previously thought.

“Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content,” write Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts in their paper, which was published online on Monday. King is a professor of social science and the latter two are doctoral candidates. “Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.”

The team created a software tool that searched over three million posts on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and the popular blogging platform Sina.com, and over 1,300 other sites, finding that only 13 percent of all social media posts were censored.

“The censors are not shy, and so we found it straightforward to distinguish (intentional) censorship from sporadic outages or transient time-out errors,” they wrote. “The censored web sites include notes such as ‘Sorry, the host you were looking for does not exist, has been deleted, or is being investigated’ and are sometimes even adorned with pictures of Jingjing, an Internet police cartoon character. Although our methods are faster than the Chinese censors, we conclude that the censors are nevertheless highly expert at their task.”

The paper quotes two Chinese-language posts (and translates them into English) that clearly critique government policies on the one-child policy and on local political corruption.

“These posts are neither exceptions nor unusual: We have thousands like these,” the authors write. “Negative posts do not accidentally slip through a leaky or imperfect system. The evidence indicates that the censors have no intention of stopping them. Instead, they are focused on removing posts that have collective action potential, regardless of whether or not they cast the Chinese leadership and their policies in a favorable light.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, and an expert on the Internet in China, e-mailed Ars to say that this research is the largest scale and most quantitative that she’s seen. MacKinnon argued similar points in the third chapter of her 2012 book, and pointed to research that she has conducted in recent years that has yielded similar findings.

“It brings empirical evidence to support an argument I have been making for several years: that the purpose of Chinese Internet censorship is not to control all criticism of the government,” MacKinnon wrote to Ars.

“The purpose is to keep the communist party in power. By allowing people to have more freewheeling—even critical—conversations online, Weibo contributes to a feeling among many Chinese Internet users that it is possible to speak truth to power in ways that weren’t previously possible. But at the same time censorship prevents people from using social media for the kind of wide-scale organizing and movement-buidling that was possible in Egypt and Tunisia. The result is that people are not only unable to organize opposition movements with social media but they also feel more hopeful and positive about being able to have more of a dialogue with the government through social media without requiring total regime change. This combination maximizes the chances that the Chinese Communist Party will maintain power at least for the short to medium term.”