As part of our ongoing project monitoring changes to Chinese search censorship, we tracked changes to censorship following Li Keqiang’s death across seven Internet platforms: Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo. We found that some keyword combinations in search queries triggers hard censorship whereas others trigger soft censorship. Our results demonstrate China’s ongoing efforts to push state-sanctioned narratives concerning politically sensitive topics, impacting the integrity of the online information environment.

This report examines the accessibility of certain types of content on VK (an abbreviation for “VKontakte”), a Russian social networking service, in Canada, Ukraine, and Russia. Among these countries, we found that Russia had the most limited access to VK social media content, due to the blocking of 94,942 videos, 1,569 community accounts, and 787 personal accounts in the country.

In an interview with As It Happens with Nil Köksal, Chris Howden on CBC Radio, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert discussed Jamal Khashoggi’s widow Hanan Elatr’s lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO. Hanan Elatr Khashoggi claimed in a civil lawsuit lodged with the Northern District of Virginia that NSO “intentionally targeted” her devices and “caused… Read more »

We discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed. These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts.

We discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed. These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts.

In 2022, the Citizen Lab gained extensive forensic visibility into new NSO Group exploit activity after finding infections among members of Mexico’s civil society, including two human rights defenders from Centro PRODH, which represents victims of military abuses in Mexico.

We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names over time, that their censorship spans multiple Chinese political topics, consists of at least two languages—English and Chinese—and applies to different world regions, including China, the United States, and Canada.

Since our report in August 2021, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to perform broad, keyword-based political censorship outside of mainland China in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American companies to resist blocking content.

Front Line Defenders’ analysis indicated that six devices belonging to six Palestinian human rights defenders were hacked with Pegasus, a spyware developed by the cyber-surveillance company NSO Group. Both the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International’s Security Lab independently confirmed these findings.