China’s Digital Censorship

Since July 9, 2015, over 250 Chinese rights lawyers, law firm staff, activists, and their relatives have been detained by Chinese public security authorities from both inside and outside of China. Rights groups have not seen this level of crackdown since the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. China has often deemed rights groups as elements “subversive” to state power and as “anti-China forces” that pose a threat to national security. In particular focus are those groups advocating for civil and political rights, known as the Weiquan (“Safeguarding Rights”) Movement.

Rights groups claim that there is an ongoing campaign against rights lawyers and activists in an effort by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to curb the Weiquan Movement and civil society at large. These social activists are often led by a decentralized group of lawyers, academics, and intellectuals who bravely seek to protect and defend the civil rights of the citizenry through litigation and legal activism in China, in spite of the obvious threats by the governing Communist party.

The ongoing campaign has steadily gained notoriety, especially on Chinese social media, and has become widely known as the “709 Crackdown,” named after the first arrest on July 9, 2015. And it now appears that the government, along with social media platforms, is tightening its digital censorship grip, according to a recently released study by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, “We (can’t) Chat: ‘709 Crackdown’ Discussions Blocked on Weibo and WeChat.”

The social media landscape in China is unique, and extremely rich. Tencent, a tech company that was founded on the back of the platform WeChat – technology that aimed to replicate Facebook – has not only technologically outpaced its American counterpart, it has also outgrown most listed companies globally, eclipsing the likes of Wells Fargo to become the world’s tenth most valuable company this April.

WeChat is hugely popular with mobile phone users for its chat, call, picture sharing, e-payment, and shopping functions. The scale and pace at which it has grown has largely been reliant on the support of the Chinese government. In return, Tencent has submitted its technology to the rigid censorship of the authorities. It is for this reason that Google pulled its operations out of China over a decade ago, and that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest remain blocked in the country. This cooperation with the government has allowed the main domestic players, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Sina, (referred to by the acronym "BATS") to consolidate their power in this space, creating unique platforms that do not exist anywhere else in the world, and amassing together a cumulative 2 billion users.

An environment like this requires persistent diligence in order to understand, and to ultimately control, and it seems the government has streamlined the system. The implementation of this level of censorship has yet to come under real stress, in fact, Tencent has its own legion of censorship officers, carrying out the will of the government.

The University of Toronto study has found that Tencent, with 889 million monthly average users, not only censors keywords, but also sentences and images based on what is believed to be a database of politically sensitive topics. The study found 41 keyword combinations related to the "709 crackdown" that are censored on WeChat. If users send messages to friends containing any of these phrases, or post them to their “Moments” (news feed), the messages would appear on the sender’s display, but could not been seen by the intended recipient or public viewers. Images have traditionally been a way to circumvent censors, but it seems technology has enabled even the censorship of this medium.

“Our discovery of related blocked images on WeChat confirms the existence of image filtering and reveals the high level and extent of censorship enforced on this popular chat app,” said the report.

In what appears to be a new initiative, government officials have also been given warnings on the use of WeChat. The central government has specifically called on officials to not cross “red lines,” an ambiguous and vague allusion to disparagement of party policies, sharing of pornography and spreading rumours to name but a few.

In a notice published on a WeChat account run by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, an anti-graft agency, other prohibited “red lines” include the acceptance of electronic red envelopes – ambiguous money transfers, vote-rigging, leaking confidential information, opening online shops, spreading rumours, or circulating unverified information to avoid negative social impact, and even expressing inappropriate opinions. The notice also provided case studies of previous offenders who had crossed red lines, and how they were subsequently punished by either verbal warnings, job dismissals, and even imprisonment.

The research study reveals just how far reaching China’s tracking and censorship abilities are. “While there is tremendous effort and numerous global petitions to help Chinese rights defenders, many of these messages fail to reach domestic audiences in China due to information control practices, including search filtering and keyword and image censorship on chat apps,” the report said.