Publications
“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 […]
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.
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.
Police led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Iris scan collection is part of long-standing police intelligence gathering programs. Through this data collection, Qinghai’s police are effectively treating entire communities as populated by potential threats to social stability.
We find that mass DNA collection in Tibet is another mass DNA collection campaign conducted under the Xi Jinping administration (2012–present), along with the mass DNA collection campaign in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the police-led national program of male DNA collection.
