MCLC: reverse engineering censorship

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Shaw Chen <sychen at gmail.com>
Subject: reverse engineering censorship
***********************************************************

For an abstract of the talk and a link to the presentation, go to:

http://gking.harvard.edu/presentations/reverse-engineering-chinese-censorsh
ip

Shaw

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Source: Harvard Magazine (9/19/13):
http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/reverse-engineering-chinese-censorship

Reverse-Engineering Chinese Censorship
By Gary King

IN A TALK at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on September
12, Gary King, Weatherhead University Professor and director of the
Institute for Quantitative Social Science, spoke about what he called the
“largest selective suppression of human expression in history”: the
Chinese government’s censorship of social media.

“This is an enormous government program designed to suppress the free flow
of information,” King said in a presentation entitled “Reverse-Engineering
Chinese Censorship.” “But since it’s so large, it paradoxically conveys an
enormous amount about itself, about what [the censors are] seeking, and
about the intentions of the Chinese government. So it’s like an elephant
sneaking through the room. It leaves big footprints.”

Scholars have long debated the motivations for censorship in China, but
King said that his research offers an unambiguous answer: the Chinese
government is not interested in stifling opinion, but in suppressing
collective action. Words alone are permitted, no matter how critical and
vitriolic. But mere mentions of collective action—of any large gathering
not sponsored by the state, whether peaceful or in protest—are censored
immediately. As he and his graduate students Jennifer Pan and Margaret
Roberts wrote in a study published this May in the American Political
Science Review, “The Chinese people are individually free but collectively
in chains.”

King’s conclusions were grounded in analyses of more than 11 million
Chinese social media posts over the span of six months, using a system
that allowed the researchers to access and download posts before they
could be censored, and to check periodically on whether they were still
available. The team used a set of keywords to collect posts in each of 85
topic areas, ranging from sensitive issues such as unrest in Inner
Mongolia, or artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, to more innocuous ones like
the World Cup and traffic in Beijing. For each topic, they could track the
volume of posts and the proportion censored over time. In a second study,
reported at the August annual meeting of the American Political Science
Association, King’s team wrote more than 1,000 of their own posts and
submitted them to Chinese social-media sites in order to test their
hypotheses about which posts would be censored.

The result was a detailed view into the currents of Chinese social media.
King and his colleagues observed that, like other social media all over
the world, Chinese social media was “bursty,” with low-frequency chatter
interrupted by occasional spikes of volume as certain topics went viral,
usually in response to news events. At baseline levels of chatter,
censorship in almost all topics was at a relatively low rate of 10 percent
to 15 percent, typically occurring within the 24 hours after the posting.
During some volume bursts, like the one following Ai’s sudden arrest in
2011, censorship would shoot up to 50 percent, or even more. But other
spikes of activity, such as that following speculation of a reversal in
the One Child Policy, provoked no such response, with censorship levels
remaining the same even as the topic swept the nation’s social media.
(King’s team found just two topics—pornography and criticism of the
censors—that were subject to constant, high levels of censorship,
irrespective of volume.)

Why did only certain topics provoke such strong censorship? King’s team
found that sensitive topics tended to share a possibility for collective
action. For instance, in the wake of the meltdown of Japan’s nuclear plant
at Fukushima, a rumor circulated that iodine would help the effects of
radiation poisoning, prompting a mad rush to buy salt in Zhejiang
province. Even though that response had nothing to do with the government,
King says the topic was heavily censored to forestall collective
organization and action. In that vein, the research team studied censored
posts in detail and found that posts with collective-action potential were
equally (and highly) likely to be censored whether they supported or
opposed government policy. As King told his audience, his findings suggest
that all posts with collective-action potential are censored, whether they
were exhortations to riot or citizens’ plans for a party to thank city
officials. When the researchers wrote and submitted their own social media
posts, they continued to find that threats of mobilization, not criticism
alone, were what Chinese government censorship aimed to suppress.

In a final participatory step, the researchers set up their own
social-media site in China. By contracting with Chinese software firms,
they installed the same censorship technologies on their new site as those
on existing sites, and they practiced writing and censoring their own
posts to understand what censorship options were available. “The best part
was, when we had a question, we called customer service, and they were
terrific!” said King. “We just said, ‘How do we stay out of trouble with
the Chinese government?’ And they said, ‘Let me tell ya!’”

Customer service gave the team a telling suggestion—to hire two or three
censors for every 50,000 users—and were forthcoming about what
technologies were most popular and helpful. He noted that the censorship
process has some technical parallels to that used for social-network
moderation in the United States to prevent child pornography or abusive
language. Users’ posts might be targeted for review based on their
previous posts, and certain content could be automatically sent for review
if it contained certain keywords. But social media companies in China are
largely able to choose their own censorship methods, King’s team observed,
writing, “The government is (perhaps intentionally) promoting innovation
and competition in the technologies of censorship.”

Keyword review has received widespread media attention, and Chinese users
often adopt homophones (“river crab” to replace “harmony,” for instance)
to get around online restrictions. But King’s team found that keyword
review—which they call a “highly error-prone methodology”—played a
relatively small role in censorship. Posts containing certain keywords
like “masses,” “terror,” or “Xinjiang” were more likely to be filtered
into automatic review before publication—a step King compared to
purgatory—rather than published immediately and reviewed later, but the
final decisions were left to manual censors.

The authors suggest that allowing online discussion and criticism may be
“an effective governmental tool in learning how to satisfy, and ultimately
mollify, the masses.” King speculated in his talk that online discussion
could even be a useful tool for keeping tabs on the performance of local
officials. “From this perspective,” the authors wrote, “the surprising
empirical patterns we discover may well be a theoretically optimal
strategy for a regime to use social media to maintain a hold on power.”
What the Chinese government fears about social media, King summed up, is
not criticism, but its ability to move people.