Publications

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 […]

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: […]

Researchers take a look at the analytics and first-party tracking ecosystem of WeChat Mini Programs.

In a new article published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, the Citizen Lab’s Noura Aljizawi, Siena Anstis, and Gözde Böcü investigate the practice of transnational repression in its physical and digital forms. They examine its impacts on dissidents abroad, focusing especially on women and queer individuals, and argue that host states bear the […]

In the past decade, we have seen a significant shift in how governments talk about misinformation. Many countries now consider or intentionally frame misinformation as a matter of national security or public safety in order to justify the passage of new laws that impose penalties for the spread of information deemed false or other administrative […]