Emile Dirks is a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab. His research explores contemporary Chinese politics, state surveillance, and transnational repression. He is the author of reports on police-led biometric data collection programs in China and the co-author of a forthcoming book on how the Chinese government governs its diaspora. Over his career, Emile has served as a visiting scholar at Yunnan University’s School of Public Administration, a non-resident research associate at the London School of Economics’ former International Drug Policy Unit, and a Futures Fellow with the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Emile has written about Chinese politics for outlets like The New York Times, Brookings, The Globe and Mail, and Foreign Policy, and has testified on China’s human rights record before the United States’ Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Publications
Citizen Lab commentary in Brookings
The TikTok debacle
“What separates benign foreign influence from malign interference? And if foreign-owned platforms like TikTok are used for both interference and influence, how should we respond?” In this piece for Brookings, Diana Fu, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Emile Dirks, research associate at the Citizen Lab, discuss issues like soft […]
Chinese Censorship Following the Death of Li Keqiang
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.
Missing Links
A Comparison of Search Censorship in China
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.
