MCLC: LINE app censorship technology

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LINE app censorship technology
From: Long Cheng 
Source: pao-pao.net (10/17/14): https://edgecastcdn.net/00107ED/paopao/?u=/article/219
Two weeks ago, the LINE chat app strengthened its censorship methods in mainland China, according to new findings from the Citizen Lab in Toronto. The academic researchers not only found proof that the app now censors more topics than ever before, but also that Line is censoring in a way that is harder to detect for the average user.
Want to discuss the CPC with your friends on LINE? Go ahead. Compare foreign leaders to dictators? No problem, chat away.  Unless you mention both the CPC and dictatorship in one chat message, you won’t notice LINE’s new censorship policy. That’s because LINE recently “improved” its censorship methods in China by adding almost fifty so-called regular expressions to its long list of taboo subjects: groups of words that users are allowed to use independently, but not in combination.
Better than a blanket block
The findings are interesting because LINE’s novel use of regular expressions allows a more fine-grained, and subtle form of censorship, Jason Q. Ng argues, one of the researchers at the University of Toronto. “It allows for a more nuanced censorship for topics such as Xinjiang, instead of just a blanket block,” he states over the phone with PaoPao.
That’s positive for the authorities, he explains: “If you hide a smaller set of things, less people will encounter censorship than if you block everything related to a certain topic. Many people might want to speak in a so-called “legitimate” way on a topic like Xinjiang, so if [the censors] block everything related to the topic, it will just make those people curious about the censorship, and the reasons behind its existence.”
Ng says that he thinks that the new method of censorship will only hinder the small minority of people who are already aware of the censorship’s existence. One of the new, censored combinations of words on Line includes “Xinjiang” （新疆）and “independent.” (獨立) Similar censorship techniques have already been implemented on Weibo.
Avoiding Streisand’s mistakes
There’s a whimsical name for the effect that the Chinese authorities are trying to avoid with these new techniques: the Streisand effect, named after American singer Barbara Streisand. In 2003, she attempted to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California by suing a photographer. The lawsuit ended up inadvertently generating a storm of publicity: whereas only six people had viewed the photographs before the lawsuits—two of which were her attorneys—the case caused 420,000 people to look up the photos within the month.
But it’s a serious principle, as demonstrated earlier this month, during the protests in Hong Kong. The massive protests there were in a sense also a prime example of the dreaded Streisand effect: after a few students were teargased by the police in an effort to suppress their protest, local outrage and support for the protests only swelled, resulting in a much higher turn out at demonstrations on the following days.
A continued commitment
The researchers at the Citizen Lab in Toronto have been tracking and analyzing LINE’s censorship for close to a year. They have reverse engineered the application, finding that when the user’s country is set to China it will enable censorship by downloading a list of censored words from a website called Naver. Whenever the list is updated, they study the differences with previous lists.
In one of the (English-language) posts on Citizen Lab’s website, they also show users how they can change their regional settings, allowing them to circumvent censorship on LINE within China.
In Citizen Lab’s report on Line’s new methods, the researchers conclude that the new list “demonstrates LINE Corporation’s continued commitment to filtering keywords for users based in China and a push to improve the underlying technology.”
Still, Jason Q. Ng says that it is hard to say whether LINE’s censorship is better or worse than other chat apps like WeChat. “For Line it is easier to see the exact way they censor,” he says. “Normally we can’t do that: we have to test the app word by word. We are still working on Wechat. Also, it depends on the way you measure: some apps might censor less, but have the ability to surveil a lot. That might be worse for the users.”
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 17, 2014
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