Censorship and manipulation of
online interactions in China and the West
Week 8
Yao Chen (姚晨), a Chinese
actress, is the most
popular microblogger in China,
with more than 75 million
followers. So this Weibo social
media, gave the Chinese a
real chance for 300 million
people every day chatting
together, talking together.
If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you know how important a big wall is
for an old kingdom. It prevents the wild man and ghost from the north.
Same was true in China, there was a great wall in the north, Chang Cheng,
which protected China from invaders for 2000 years. Today, China also has a
great firewall, the biggest digital boundary in the world.
A firewall is a security system that controls the incoming
and outgoing network traffic based on applied rule set. A
firewall establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure
internal network and another network (e.g., the Internet)
that is assumed not to be secure and trusted.
• The Golden Shield Project (Chinese：金盾工程),
colloquially referred to as the Great Firewall of China
is a censorship and surveillance project operated by
the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) division of
the government of China. The project was initiated in
1998 and began operations in November 2003.
• The political and ideological background of the Golden
Shield Project is considered to be one of Deng
Xiaoping’s favorite sayings in the early 1980s: "If you
open the window for fresh air, you have to expect
some flies to blow in."
IP blocking
DNS filtering and
Redirection
URL filtering
Blocking
methods
Packet filtering
Connection reset
SSL man-in-themiddle attack
Active IP probing
VPN/SSH traffic
recognition
Websites
blocked
in China
Gmail
Google
( Maps, Docs, Drive,
Encrypted, APIs)
Picasa
Facebook
Youtube
Twitter
Blogspot
WorldPress
Archive
DuckDuckGo
Flickr
BBC
…
Censored content
• Web sites belonging to "outlawed" or suppressed groups, such
as pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong
• News sources that often cover topics that are considered
defamatory against China, such as police brutality, Tiananmen
Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and
Marxist sites. These sites include Voice of and the Chinese edition
of BBC News.
• Sites related to the Taiwanese government, media, or other
organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, and
most large Taiwanese community websites or blogs.
• Web sites that contain anything the Chinese authorities regard as
obscenity or pornography
• Web sites relating to criminal activity
• Sites linked with the Dalai Lama, his teachings or the International
Tibet Independence Movement
• Most blogging sites experience frequent or permanent outages
• Web sites deemed as subversive
In China, we have billions of Internet users. So even though China's is
a totally censored Internet, for Great Firewall, which keeps out
“undesirable” foreign websites such as Facebook, but still, Chinese
Internet society is really booming.
On the one hand, China government want to satisfy people's need of a
social network, for people really love social networking. But on the other
hand, they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data
any time they want. That's also the reason Google was pulled out from
China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants
to keep the server.
China's Internet firewall censors Hong Kong protest news
China and Hong Kong on Instagram
Instagram has been blocked in China since 28th September. The left picture shows
Instagram in China with a message stating that the feed cannot be refreshed. The right
side shows an Instagram search page in Hong Kong, which shows overtly political
images related to the protests.
Weibo in China and Twitter in Hong Kong
China's microblogging site, Sina Weibo does not allow for the search of the
term "Hong Kong student." The Weibo results shown below are not related to
the Hong Kong protest or students' movement. The right picture shows the
results on Twitter for the same search term, "Hong Kong student."
Baidu in China and Google in Hong Kong
Pictured left, is Baidu, China's biggest search engine. A search for the term
"Occupy Central" brings blocked results and headlines with a pro-China slant.
One of the headlines reads: "Occupy Central is destructive to the rule of law,
social peace and stability." In comparison, searching for the same term on
Google in Hong Kong, shows news of the Occupy Central demonstrations.
A case study:
Google.cn in China
China Netizens-power is aggregating
GOOGLE.CN
Two categories of Chinese Internet censorship
1.“Outside the great firewall”
•
Filtering of websites outside of China
Two categories of Chinese Internet censorship
2. “Inside the great firewall”
• Deletion of content on domestic commercial websites
• Takedown of domestically hosted websites
• Shut down of data centers
Government VS. Google.CN
•
Because the local law, Google.cn faced a lot of blocking actions by the Chinese
government since its entry in 2000 with Google.com
•
From 2005, Google had its own server in China and decided to censor the research
results by itself.
www.google.cn
•
Local law requiring to share user information
•
Many game changer products not launched. ( YouTube, G+)
•
Chinese government political censorship and surveillance
Scaring Facebook
 What Facebook tells us
• ‘Private’ spaces
• Users can choose adverts
THIS IS NOT THE WHOLE STORY
 The truth
• Tracking users’ browsing history
Identify users’ interests better
• Identifying songs and films playing nearby
Nudging users to write about them
 Shift in Facebook’s business model
Sharing
Clicking
 The true dangers
exposed to positive posts
feel happier
and write more positive posts
more clicks
more advertising revenue
Facebook hides negative for business
Happiness experiment
They do not yet have the power to
make us happy or sad but they will
readily make us happier or sadder if it
helps their earnings.
Emotional contagion through
social networks
Structure
1. Concept explanation
2. When emotional contagion connects to
social networks:
• Previous experiments on Facebook
• Another experiment on Facebook
Method
Result
1. What is “emotional contagion”
• Emotional contagion is the tendency for two individuals to
emotionally converge.
• One view developed by Elaine Hatfield is that emotional
contagion can be done through automatic mimicry and
synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures
and movements with those of another person.
2. When it connects to
social networks, like Facebook
Previous experiments of emotional contagion
on Facebook
• Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional
contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions
without their awareness
• viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow
affect us negatively, producing an “alone together” social
comparison effect
• failed to address whether nonverbal are necessary for
contagion to occur, or if verbal alone is enough
Another experiment of emotional contagion on
Facebook:
Whether exposure to emotions led people to change their
own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to
emotional content led people to post content that was
consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether
exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar
verbal expressions
Method
• People (N = 689,003, randomly) were exposed to emotional
expressions in their News Feed
• Two parallel experiments:
Positive emotion & Negative emotion
• If they contained at least one positive or negative word
• 1 week (January 11–18, 2012)
Result
• Emotions spread via contagion through social networks
(support previous studies)
• people’s emotional expressions on Facebook predict friends’
emotional expressions, even days later
• viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow
affect us negatively. In fact, this is the result when people are
exposed to less positive content, rather than more
• To date, there is no experimental evidence that emotions or
moods are contagious in the absence of direct interaction
between experiencer and target
Thank You
Reference
• ANTI, M. (2012). Behind the Great Firewall of China. TED-Talk from
http://www. youtube. com/watch.
• Norris, Pippa; World Bank Staff (2009). Public Sentinel: News Media and
Governance Reform. World Bank Publications. p. 360. ISBN 978-0-82138200-4. Retrieved 11 January 2011.
•
• "How China’s Internet Police Control Speech on the Internet". Radio Free
Asia. Retrieved 11 June 2013. "China’s police authorities spent the three
years between 2003 and 2006 completing the massive “Golden Shield
Project.” Not only did over 50 percent of China’s policing agencies get on
the Internet, there is also an agency called the Public Information Network
Security and Monitoring Bureau, which boasts a huge number of
technologically advanced and well-equipped network police. These are all
the direct products of the Golden Shield Project."
•
• "Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China". Cyber.law.harvard.edu.
Retrieved 2011-06-13.