MCLC: censoring the news before it happens

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: censoring the news before it happens
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (7/10/13):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jul/10/censoring-news-before-happ
ens-china/

Censoring the News Before It Happens
By Perry Link

Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices
to website editors around the country that say things like, “Report on the
new provincial budget tomorrow, but do not feature it on the front page,
make no comparisons to earlier budgets, list no links, and say nothing
that might raise questions”; “Downplay stories on Kim Jung-un’s facelift”;
and “Allow stories on Deputy Mayor Zhang’s embezzlement but omit the
comment boxes.” Why, one might ask, do censors not play it safe and
immediately block anything that comes anywhere near offending Beijing? Why
the modulation and the fine-tuning?

In fact, for China’s Internet police, message control has grown to include
many layers of meaning. Local authorities have a toolbox of phrases—fairly
standard nationwide—that they use to offer guidance to website editors
about dealing with sensitive topics. The harshest response is “completely
and immediately delete.” But with the rapid growth of difficult-to-control
social media, a need has arisen for a wide range of more subtle
alternatives. For stories that are acceptable, but only after proper
pruning, the operative phrase is “first censor, then publish.” For
sensitive topics on which central media have already said something, the
instructions may say “reprint Xinhua but nothing more.” For topics that
cannot be avoided because they are already being widely discussed, there
are such options as “mention without hyping,” “publish but only under
small headlines,” “put only on back pages,” “close the comment boxes,” and
“downplay as time passes.”

We know all this thanks in large part to Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor
at the School of Information at Berkeley, who leads the world in ferreting
out and piecing together how Chinese Internet censorship works. Xiao and
his staff have collected and organized a repository of more than 2,600
directives 
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/directives-from-the-ministry-of-truth/>
 that website editors across China have received during the last ten
years. Some are only a line or two long; others run to many pages. Some
are verbatim, others are paraphrases. Some were collected from Twitter,
Sina Weibo (China’s domestic Twitter), and Internet forums, while others
were sent to Xiao by editors in China who were frustrated or angry—either
at what the directives said or at the fact of censorship itself.

And as Xiao has discovered, the new censorship strategies show the
government’s growing awareness of the power of social media. Informal news
stories—often accompanied by photos from smart phones—now spread widely
and quickly enough that official media lose credibility if they do not at
least mention them. In such cases, “on the back page” might be the best
option. Moreover, Web users now understand Internet censorship well enough
that the issue can itself be one that angers them. (The traditional print
and electronic media are censored, too, but directives for them arrive via
unrecorded telephone calls, which are much harder to trace and seldom
leak. Because the Internet is too large to manage by telephone, its
directives go out in writing.) Under the scrutiny of Web users, propaganda
officials face the unwelcome task of censoring the Internet while trying
to appear as though they are not—or at least not doing it “unreasonably.”
This forces them to seek balance. In one instance, a story about two
policemen who were killed in an auto accident got out on the social media;
censors anticipated an outcry if they “completely and immediately
deleted,” so they allowed the story to appear but added the instruction
“close comment boxes”—apparently from fear that the boxes might fill with
cheers of the kind that normally spring from generalized resentment of the
police.

China’s censors use much time and money restricting Internet speech.
Consider this summary of directives government officials in Beijing sent
to Hunan Province in June 2011 (it was leaked five months later):

All websites should conscientiously grasp the relevant principles and use
them to purge any material that:

1) blackens the image of Party and state leaders or obfuscates the great
historical achievements of the Party;

2) attacks our system or advocates the Western democratic system;

3) incites illegal assembly, petitioning, or “rights support” activity
that harms social stability;

4) uses price rises, corruption cases, or other controversial events to
spread rumors and incite hatred of officials, of police, or of the wealthy
that could lead to activity offline;

5) incites ethnic hatred [of Han Chinese] that harms national unity;

6) attacks the Party’s systems of managing the media and the Internet by
using the slanderous claim that we limit free speech.

But as Xiao has revealed, the censors expend even more effort on the
parallel task of “guiding” expression in pro-government directions. When a
story reflects well on the Party, Web editors receive instructions to
“place prominently on the home page” or “immediately recirculate.”
Authorities also organize and pay for artificial pro-government expression
in chat rooms and comment boxes. Provincial and local offices of External
Propaganda and Party Propaganda hire staff at salaries of about US $100
per month (less, for part-time work) to post pro-government comments. It
is hard to say how many salaried commenters exist nationwide, but
estimates run to the high 100,000s. Some of this commenting is outsourced
as piece-work. A few years ago, people who agreed to do this work were
given the satiric label “fifty-centers” because they were said to be paid
fifty Chinese cents per post. By now there are commercial enterprises that
contract for comment work. Even prisons do it; prisoners can earn sentence
reductions for producing set numbers of pro-government comments.

The “fifty-cent” initiative has met with some problems, however. Posts for
pay have become so repetitive and mechanical that Web users spot them
easily. Such posts also run the risk of undermining opinion that might be
genuinely pro-government, because they make any pro-government comment
subject to the suspicion that it was done for money. In some circles,
mockery aimed at fifty-centers has expanded to include regime apologists
of any kind. Someone who thinks that External Propaganda might actually be
doing some good by watching the Internet is called a “self-employed
fifty-center.” Westerners who praise the CCP are “foreign fifty-centers.”

Xiao Qiang protects his informants by slightly altering dates, names, and
word-orders. He needs to do this: in 2005 the journalist Shi Tao was sent
to prison for ten years for sending an unapproved document overseas. Xiao
and his small staff check the authenticity of what they receive against
evidence of actual censorship. Occasionally they detect fake directives
and toss them out. The work is tedious and time-consuming, but sometimes
they get lucky. One day in spring 2012, as Xiao was using keywords to
validate directives, a Google search turned up an item that was oddly
labeled “save for evidence.” He opened it to find a very large file that
contained a full year of directives to a major province-level news forum.
Normally such material is guarded behind firewalls in government servers,
but Google found this one in someone’s personal space. Xiao did not know
the person, but the label “save for evidence” seemed a hint that he or she
might be a website editor who had become disgusted with government
directives. Xiao’s archive contains this and three similar large,
comprehensive sets of directives.

In late June, ten scholars of Chinese law, politics, society, and language
attended a workshop at Berkeley to join Xiao and his staff in analyzing
Xiao’s archive. The day sparkled with insights, a few of which were these:

* One of the principal aims of the government directives is to prevent
unapproved groups from organizing through the Internet (noted as
“incitement,” “gatherings,” etc.); some of the scholars argued that this
goal is even more fundamental than prevention of negative comment about
the Party.

* Because political power and commercial interests are commonly
intertwined in China, censorship often merges with something that
resembles commercial “reputation management” in the West. In 2006, when a
scandal broke over melamine found in the baby formula of the Sanlu milk
company, government censors sent out dozens of directives trying to play
down the matter. To protect Sanlu? To tamp down general “incitement”?
Both? In any case, it is easy to find examples of censorship that protects
both political and commercial interests at all levels.

* In some cases a directive to block an item of news comes out even before
the news itself appears. This seems to happen because of worry over what
public reaction will be. In August, 2010, Web editors in Hunan received
this directive: “The trial in the June 21 murder case in Guizhou will open
tomorrow; no medium of any kind is to make any report about either the
trial or the sentencing.”

* In its attempts to garner popular support for censorship, the regime
still lumps political speech together with pornography. (The two are
similarly “unhealthful to society,” according to the government.)

* Officials tend to be protective of their own jurisdictions, but not
necessarily of others. News of a scandal in Henan, blocked in Henan, might
appear in Shanxi. While local officials rarely oppose the central
government, that, too, can happen. After Xinhua, the state news agency,
reported that a military official in Guangzhou had assaulted a flight
attendant in 2012, the Propaganda Department for Guangdong Province
ordered that Guangdong websites “not republish related Xinhua copy.”

* Directives aimed at improving the popular image of courts are of mixed
quality. Some instruct editors to refer to people facing trial as suspects
rather than criminals, and this seems a step forward; but others seem to
revert to an earlier mindset, telling editors to “report on the upcoming
trial but not on the execution to follow.”

* News of suicides, the government seems to have concluded, should be
blocked, not only to protect the overall image of a “harmonious society,”
but also to reduce the credibility of suicide threats, which can be used
to leverage concessions from officials.

* Until about ten years ago, more than half of the reporting in the Xinhua
information system was “internal reference” (classified) reporting to the
leadership on what people in society were actually doing and thinking.
With the dramatic growth of the Internet, this function of Xinhua has
shrunk. The Internet makes it far more readily apparent—to anyone—what
people are doing and thinking.

In the end, though, none of the parts of Xiao Qiang’s project is as
important as the whole that it seeks to reveal. In recent years China’s
rulers have been building a gargantuan Internet censorship system. It is
many times larger than any comparable effort, in any era. Soviet-era
censorship and China’s own Mao-era approach to the press were tighter and
also included elements of guiding as well as outright suppressing of
information. But no system in the world has been remotely as large in the
number of details it attended to or in the number of people devoted to the
work. (The recently disclosed efforts of the NSA to store, in secrecy, the
metadata of electronic communications of nearly all US citizens, however
deplorable, are not nearly as far-reaching. And the NSA activity
apparently has been limited to collecting data and occasionally to
eavesdropping—not to blocking, manipulating, or manufacturing what is
said.)

Most of the Chinese system remains obscure; Xiao’s 2,600 directives show
only a corner of it—or, more precisely, several small corners. On June 17
and 18, Xiao attended an international “Freedom Online” conference in
Tunis. One of his hosts brought him to visit the nearby Bulla Regia ruins
of an ancient Roman city. They observed some walls here, some columns
there, a mosaic over there—remnants that spoke of something much grander.
Xiao was reminded of his research project—except that, in his case, the
huge mysterious picture was slowly coming together, not deteriorating.

July 10, 2013, 4:26 p.m.