In this paper, the Citizen Lab’s Mohamed Amed and Jeffrey Knockel examine Chinese censorship bias in LLMs with a censorship detector they designed as part of the research. They warn that when LLMs are trained on state-censored texts, their output is more likely to align with the state.  An Analysis of Chinese Censorship Bias in… Read more »

In this paper co-authored by the Citizen Lab’s Jeffrey Knockel, researchers investigate the secret relationships between VPN operators and the vulnerabilities these VPNs share. The authors warn that the obfuscation of these relationships prohibits consumers from making informed decisions about their digital security and misleads them about the security properties of the VPNs.  Hidden Links:… Read more »

Irene Poetranto examines Indonesia’s use of domain name system (DNS) redirection as a method of internet censorship in a new essay published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Techno-Legal Internet Controls in Indonesia and Their Impact on Free Expression Poetranto explains how DNS redirection, a new type of DNS tampering, was introduced in… Read more »

المؤلفون: جيفري نوكل، جاكوب داليك، نورا الجيزاوي، محمد أحمد، ليفي ميليتي، وجاستن لاو. ملاحظة للقراء: هذا المستند هو ترجمة غير رسمية وهو نسخة مختصرة من التقرير الكامل تتضمن أقساماً مختارة. لذا يرجى الملاحظة أنه لا يشمل التحليل الشامل والمناقشات التفصيلية الموجودة في النسخة الأصلية. وكونه ترجمة غير رسمية، قد يحتوي على بعض الأخطاء أو التفسيرات… Read more »

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.