Category Archives: China

#imweekly: July 8, 2013

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Egypt
As of July 3, President Mohamed Morsi is out of office, but much of the Western world is still not sure about what happened in Egypt and why. Was it a coup d’état or not? Wikipedia is calling it the “2013 Egyptian coup d’état,” but whether the term fits is being contested. Foreign Policy blogger Marya Hannun breaks down the Wikipedia edit war surrounding Morsi’s ousting. So-called wiki-wars over acceptable phraseology and editing have been waged before.  Relatedly: viewing events in Egypt from a social media perspective offers valuable insight into how social media and networking sites, namely YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, factor into current political discourse and social change. For example, the opposition group, Tamarod, enlisted a range of media platforms to shape its campaign and gather more than 20 million signatures leading up to demonstration calling for Morsi’s removal.

Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is being criticized for harsh sentences recently handed down for seven cyber activists arrested in 2011 for Facebook posts. The men were accused of joining and using Facebook with the intention of starting protests. Political gatherings and public protests are prohibited in Saudi Arabia. The men were charged with crimes including illegal information gathering and “breaking allegiance with the king.” Abd al-Hamid al-Amer received 10 years in jail, the longest sentence. Other defendants—Ali Ali al-Hadlaq, Hussein Mohammed al-Bathir, Mostafa Hussein al-Mujahad, Mohammed Abd a-Hadi al-Khalifa, Hussein Yasin al-Sulayman, and Saleh Ali al-Shaya—received lesser sentences. The men also lost the right to travel freely within and outside the kingdom (rights that men are usually given freely in Saudi Arabia), and restrictions were placed on their future freedom of expression, including bans on public speaking and writing.

China
On July 1, the Chinese government instituted an online petitioning system intended to update its centuries-old petitioning custom. The website is intended to enable citizens to post petitions and air grievances concerning issues such as forced evictions, pollution, or corruption. However, as soon as the site was launched, it crashed. The response was great enough—beyond government expectations and the website’s capacity—to result in a shutdown that sparked excited debate about the cause. Some Weibo users suggested the crash was an act of censorship. WeiboSuite, a platform created by students at Hong Kong University interested in Internet censorship, reports the government has been monitoring and removing citizens’ posts from the petition site. The official government response is that it underestimated response rates and the website was simply overwhelmed.

Pakistan
A Lahore High Court has rejected an interim order to restore YouTube services across the country. Bytes for All, an NGO dedicated to ICTs for development, democracy, and social justice, filed the petition several months ago. In September 2012, the Pakistan People’s Party government banned the video-sharing site in response to widespread public outrage about the dissemination of a film deemed blasphemous for taking offensive positions against the Prophet. YouTube was banned after its parent company, Google, denied official requests to take down the film. Pakistan’s religious communities and members of the information technology sector remain deep in debate as to how the county will regulate the Internet so as to uphold Islamic values as well as citizen’s rights. Saad Rassol, a lawyer from Lahore, explains in a post for Pakistan Today, “It is not simply a question of whether YouTube should be unblocked because it serves an academic or social purpose. It is a question of whether we preserve individual freedoms, and discourse, even at the cost of being offended by the words of the speaker, from time to time. Or will we descend into becoming a society where subjective morality and religious sensitivities become a sword to silence tongues and stamp out all debate.”

#IMweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

Culture Memes as Creative Resistance on Tiananmen Square Anniversary

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This is a guest post.

Ahead of last week’s anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese government engaged in what has now become an expected annual crackdown on Internet freedom. This year, however, the government adopted more advanced and subtle means of censorship. Rather than blocking all search results for sensitive terms, websites such as Weibo are instead displaying carefully curated results that have little to do with the 1989 protests.

Although Chinese censorship is ever-more sophisticated, Internet users in China are finding creative ways to express themselves and commemorate the tragedy. Memes – spontaneous, humorous, grass-roots-style online satirical works – are a significant feature of the Chinese Internet, ranging from 2009’s Grass Mud Horse to memes involving sunflower seeds and self-portraits of people wearing sunglasses, both inspired by arrested Chinese dissidents. These memes take the form of photos, videos, animations, and texts that defy and ridicule Chinese authorities.

This year, Chinese Internet users created multiple variations of an iconic photograph from the 1989 protests, incorporating images ranging from yellow ducks to Legos. These images began to circulate through social media in China days before the June 4th anniversary as a way to bypass censorship, and gained momentum largely for their humor and brevity.

The famous photograph – known as “Tank Man” – of the 1989 protest has long been banned in Chinese cyberspace. The photo, featuring a man blocking a series of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest on June 4, 1989, directly points to the dictatorship of Chinese government and has startled people worldwide.

Days before this year’s Tiananmen Square Anniversary, someone wittily replaced the four tanks in the original photograph with giant yellow ducks. The meme is based on a 54-foot-tall duck sculpture, created by a Dutch artist, that currently floats in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor.

The “tank man” picture is also photoshopped into a Lego man facing down three green Lego tanks. By embedding these images in posts instead of using banned keywords, Internet users can often escape automatic deletion.

Another picture showing a cow in front of a line of bulldozers is also getting past Weibo’s censors. While Weibo has blocked the words “big yellow duck” in response to the memes, the word “cow” appears to be uncensored.

While censors continue to add new words to the blocklist, Internet users continue to create new images, making it impossible for the government to shut down conversation about the Tiananmen Square protests entirely.

Tiananmen Square Anniversary: China Experiments with Subtle Censorship and Netizens Fight Back with Images

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To ensure its country’s Internet remains in good working order, the Chinese government has used June 4 as an unofficial “Internet maintenance” day. In 2009, more than 300 sites went down. In 2010, a slew of blocked sites (many pornographic) became accessible. Last year, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index dropped 64.89 points, leading the popular Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo to ban searches of related terms. Why such erratic behavior? June 4 also marks the day when, in 1989, tanks entered Tiananmen Square to violently quash pro-democracy protests.

Days before this year’s 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Weibo experimented with a much subtler form of censorship, but Chinese netizens used creative images to signal their acknowledgement of what Chinese government wishes the country would forget.

Typically, users who search for sensitive terms such as “June 4th incident” receive the message, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for [keyword] cannot be displayed.” Beginning on May 31, searches for “Tiananmen incident,” “24th anniversary,” “June 4th,” “64 incident” returned a sanitized list, for example, referencing a 1976 protest that occurred in Tiananmen Square, or a seemingly innocuous message that the search yielded no results, according to analysis from the Chinese Internet transparency organization GreatFire.org.

By the evening of June 3, Weibo reverted to displaying its original censorship announcement in response to searches of sensitive terms. Citizen Lab posted a list of 71 terms blocked on Weibo, many variations on the numbers six, four, and 1989. China Digital Times mentioned additional terms including names of people and places.

The seemingly benign terms “today,” “tonight,” “big yellow duck,” and “black shirt” also faced restriction on Weibo. The latter two reference an online meme and calls for Chinese to wear black shirts to observe the anniversary.

While Weibo’s text filters grow ever more sophisticated, the network seems less able to police images. Chinese netizens exploited this fact, posting variations of the iconic “Tank Man” image. One replaced the tanks with yellow rubber ducks (hence the blockage of “big yellow duck”); one showed a cow in front of a line of bulldozers; another showed a praying mantis pushing against a wheel, referencing a popular idiom about the futility of trying to stop the future.

On May 31, the Chinese government also cut off access to the encrypted (https) version of Wikipedia, which Chinese Internet users could use to see articles banned on the unencrypted (http) version.

Protests in Inner Mongolia vs. Disney theme parks: social media censorship in China

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A recent paper from Harvard University researchers Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts contains a neat “censorship magnitude” graph showing which types of social media posts are most and least likely to be taken down by Chinese censors:

“Events with Highest and Lowest Censorship Magnitude,” from How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression, by Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts

By downloading over 3,600,000 social media posts from nearly 1400 blogs, forums, and microblogs, then revisiting the sites later to determine what kinds of content had been manually removed, King, Pan, and Roberts were able to conclude that Chinese government censorship tends to focus more intently on posts that call for collective action and social mobilization, rather than removing all posts critical of the government:

Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. 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. 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.

Read the full paper: How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression