Publications

In collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we identified two distinct actors aligned with the People’s Republic of China that have been targeting and impersonating journalists and civil society. Our findings provide insight into the Chinese government’s practice of digital transnational repression and its shift to a system of state-sponsored attacks carried out by private contractors.

In a policy brief for the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Citizen Lab researchers argue that the Canadian government must do more to protect diaspora members from transnational repression. In the face of powerful authoritarian states and new surveillance capabilities, Canada’s domestic and foreign policy has hindered its ability to respond to threats of transnational […]

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.