Academics Launch Fake Social Network to Get an Inside Look at Chinese Censorship

New research shows Chinas online censorship relies on a competitive market where companies vie to offer the best speech-suppressing technology and services.

Nine years after Mark Zuckerberg quit Harvard to build Facebook, one of the universitys political science professors, Gary King, decided this year it was time to launch his own social media site. But King didnt set up his Chinese social network to make money; instead, he wanted to get an insiders view of Chinese censorship, which relies on Internet providers censoring their own sites in line with government guidelines. King wont disclose his sites URL, to protect people involved with his project.

Previous studies of Chinese censorship have mostly involved monitoring Chinese social sites to see which updates censors remove (see Social Media Censorship Offers Clues to Chinas Plans). Some have relied on rare interviews with insiders willing to talk about their role in censorship. By contracting with a major Chinese provider of Web software to help run his site, King could instead inspect the available censorship tools firsthand. He could also ask the companys representatives whatever he wanted about how those tools should be used. When we had questions, we just called customer service, says King. They were being paid to help us.

Along with some parallel experiments on established social sites, Kings dabble in Internet entrepreneurialism has shown that Chinese censorship relies more heavily than was known on automatic filtering that holds posts back for human review before they appear online. The researchers also uncovered evidence that Chinas vast censorship system is underpinned by a surprisingly vibrant, capitalistic market where companies compete to offer better censorship technology and services.

Censorship of Chinese sites is sometimes inconsistent and is known to rely heavily on people screening posts manually. But the software the Harvard researchers bought to run their site came with an unexpectedly complex toolkit of automated censorship tools, says King, and the company that provided it was happy to give advice on how to use them. The options were really quite astounding.

Not only could new posts be automatically held back for manual review by a human censor based on specific keywords, but they could be treated differently based on their length, where on the site they appeared, and whether they started a conversation or contributed to an existing one. Specific people could be targeted for more aggressive censorship based on their IP address, how recently they had last posted, and their reputation in the community.

Making customer service calls to the software provider the team had contracted also revealed that it was possible to choose from a range of extra, paid-for plug-ins offering more sophisticated filtering options. Those conversations also shed light on the perennial mystery of just how many censors there are screening online posts in China. King was told that to keep the government happy a site should employ two or three censors for every 50,000 users. Based on that, he estimates that there are between 50,000 and 75,000 censors working at Internet companies inside China.

In a parallel experiment, Kings group recruited dozens of people inside China to help post 1,200 different updates to 100 different social sites to see what got censored. Just over 40 percent of all those posts were immediately held back by automated censorship tools. Those filtered posts either appeared within a day or two or never made it online. Watching the fate of different posts suggested sites used a wide variety of different censorship technologies and procedures.

Those findings and Kings experience running his own site suggest that China has created a kind of competitive market in censorship, he says. Companies are free to run their censorship operations mostly as they wish, as long as they dont allow the wrong kind of speech to flourish. That creates an incentive to find ways to censor more effectively so as to minimize the impact on profitability. Theres plenty of diversity and room for technical and business innovation in censorship, says King. Companies get to experiment and choose from firms trying to sell them censorship technology.

Jason Ng, a research fellow at the University of Toronto specializing in Chinese censorship, says that Kings look at the options available for censorship is unprecedented. The authorities seem to recognize that government isnt best suited for the performance of censorship, says Ng. Its better for private companies to do this not just for innovation but for resources.

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Academics Launch Fake Social Network to Get an Inside Look at Chinese Censorship