This project is a large-scale comparison of the three services, matching thousands of Chinese-language Wikipedia articles with their in-China counterparts, in order to identify the “content gaps” in the two baike. The difficulties of identifying traditional cases of information control in environments with distributed oversight like online enclopedias will be discussed. The research methodology and some of the initial results (including tables of possibly censored articles) will also be presented.

The China Chats keyword list was tested on Sina Weibo four times from Jun to Aug 2013. The data allows us to identify changes in censorship on Sina Weibo over time.

August 29, 2013

Citizen Lab Google Policy Fellow Jason Q. Ng is participating in a discussion at the New America Foundation NYC on Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 6:30pm.

Working with the just-released China Chats keyword list, Jason Q. Ng extended The Citizen Lab/UNM’s analysis by checking whether each of the 4,256 keywords was blocked from searching on Sina Weibo. This report includes further analysis and examination of other potential censorship tactics by Weibo revealed in the data.

In this collaborative study between the Citizen Lab and Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico we examine the implementation of censorship and surveillance in two IM clients maintained by two different Chinese companies. For a period of more than a year and a half, we downloaded and decrypted the censorship and surveillance keyword lists used by the client software of two IM programs used in China: TOM-Skype and Sina UC.

Citizen Lab Google Policy Fellow Jason Q. Ng is participating in the Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) taking place from 14-16 June 2013 at the University of Oxford.

As citizens in China commemorate the twenty-fourth anniversary of June 4th today, we identified 71 keywords that are currently blocked from searching on Sina Weibo.

Bloomberg Business Week reports on joint Citizen Lab and University of New Mexico research on surveillance in the TOM-Skype instant messaging client (Chinese version of Skype).

Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Philippa Gill and Senior Analytics and Visualization Developer Greg Wiseman will participate at this year’s Boston Freedom in Online Communications Day (BFOC), taking place on 8 March 2013.