Jason Q. Ng is a graduate student in East Asian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Blocked on Weibo, a book about censorship and sensitive topics in Chinese social media. Other recent topics of research include online reaction to the 2012 Party Congress in China and anti-Japanese discourse on Sina Weibo. He previously worked as a research consultant at China Digital Times and a book editor, having graduated with a degree in English from Brown University. Ng will be working with the Citizen Lab on various research projects over the coming summer.
We investigate what keywords might trigger censorship via automatic review in Sina Weibo and followed the pathways a typical censored post might take on Chinese social media.
This report is part of a series which analyzes regionally-based keyword censorship in LINE, a mobile messaging application developed by LINE Corporation. The most recent update to the censorship keyword list include a number of new entries as well as the introduction of regular expressions for more advanced keyword matching.
This report is the third in a series which analyzes regionally-based keyword censorship in LINE, a mobile messaging application developed by LINE Corporation. We document recent changes to the list of keywords used by LINE to trigger regionally-based keyword filtering for users with accounts registered to Chinese phone numbers.
This post presents a 22-month infographic overview of how events are correlated with blocking of information related to Bo Xilai on Sina Weibo.
This post is an update to our report on regionally-based keyword censorship in the popular chat application LINE. It covers responses from LINE Corporation to questions around censorship functionality in the application and recent changes to how keyword censorship and traffic encryption operate in the latest versions of LINE.
This post is an introduction to Asia Chats a research project analyzing
information controls and privacy in mobile messaging applications used
in Asia. The project will produce a series of reports that will begin
with a focus on WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk. Reports will include
analysis based on our technical investigation of censorship or
surveillance functionality, assessment of privacy issues surrounding
these applications’ use and storage of user data, and comparison of the
terms of service and privacy policies of the applications.
This project is a large-scale comparison of the three services, matching thousands of Chinese-language Wikipedia articles with their in-China counterparts, in order to identify the “content gaps” in the two baike. The difficulties of identifying traditional cases of information control in environments with distributed oversight like online enclopedias will be discussed. The research methodology and some of the initial results (including tables of possibly censored articles) will also be presented.
The China Chats keyword list was tested on Sina Weibo four times from Jun to Aug 2013. The data allows us to identify changes in censorship on Sina Weibo over time.
Working with the just-released China Chats keyword list, Jason Q. Ng extended The Citizen Lab/UNM’s analysis by checking whether each of the 4,256 keywords was blocked from searching on Sina Weibo. This report includes further analysis and examination of other potential censorship tactics by Weibo revealed in the data.
In this Tea Leaf Nation article, Citizen Lab Google Policy Fellow Jason Q. Ng examines the recent changes to censorship on Sina Weibo.
