On March 22, 2021, Citizen Lab research associate Christopher Parsons appeared before the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations to testify about issues of national security, governance, and trust with regards to Chinese companies and their technical products and services.

A comparative analysis of security, privacy, and censorship issues in TikTok and Douyin, both developed by ByteDance.

In their reporting on how China handled the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York Times cites Citizen Lab research that outlines information controls on Chinese social media during the outbreak.

The solution to Canada’s 5G problems will not be found in policies that principally address one company. Instead, a robust and vendor-neutral approach is required.

As a follow-up to our March 2020 report, we conducted daily tests on WeChat and collected 2,174 censored keywords between January to May 2020. This data provides a view into how narratives and messaging on the pandemic are controlled and molded on social media in China.

Speaking with the Toronto Star, Citizen Lab senior research associate, Dr. Christopher Parsons, comments on the United Kingdom’s move to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G infrastructure. As Canada works to articulate its stance on the Chinese company, it must reconcile its unique relationship with Beijing.

The analysis of YY and WeChat indicates broad censorship—blocking sensitive terms as well as general information and neutral references—potentially limiting the public’s ability to access information that may be essential to their health and safety.

本报告延续上一篇针对微信朋友圈图片过滤技术的研究，分析微信如何在聊天功能中实现实时图片过滤。微信是中国腾讯控股有限公司旗下的即时通讯应用，目前是中国最受欢迎的聊天软件之一，也是全球排名第四的最流行聊天软件。朋友圈是微信上最常用的功能之一，其中图片是用户最期望看到的内容分享形式。

In this work, we study how Tencent implements image filtering on WeChat. We found that Tencent implements realtime, automatic censorship of chat images on WeChat based on what text is in an image and based on an image’s visual similarity to those on a blacklist. Tencent facilitates this realtime filtering by maintaining a hash index of MD5 hashes of sensitive image files.

今年是中国1989年天安门民主运动的30周年纪念。当年，学生自发举行一系列游行示威，呼吁实施民主改革，中共领导人则选择使用武力镇压运动。中国红十字会称有2700名民众在武力镇压中身亡，但有不少研究机构指出死伤人数远不止这个。在2014年解密的一份美国政府机密文件显示，中国内部统计的死亡人数达10,454人。