In this paper presented at USENIX FOCI 2015 we use reverse engineering to provide a view into how keyword censorship operates on four popular social video platforms in China: YY, 9158, Sina Show, and GuaGua. We also find keyword surveillance capabilities on YY. Our findings show inconsistencies in the implementation of censorship and the keyword lists used to trigger censorship events between the platforms we analyzed. We reveal a range of targeted content including criticism of the government and collective action. These results provide evidence that there is no monolithic set of rules that govern how information controls are implemented in China.

Contained are links to a set of 9,054 sensitive Chinese keywords, which combine 13 existing lists. These keywords may be helpful to researchers who are searching for censored content in Chinese or testing for network interference.

Christopher Parsons spoke to the CBC regarding the Canadian government’s growing interest in the real-time contents of social media and to the Washington Post on privacy concerns with Uber’s rider database.

We investigate what keywords might trigger censorship via automatic review in Sina Weibo and followed the pathways a typical censored post might take on Chinese social media.

This edition of Social Media Watch deals with top court rulings on digital privacy, social media monitoring, and mobile security news.

Social Media Watch returns with updates from the EU and US legal landscape, some notable cases of government access to personal data, and an overview of some important reports describing the need for updated regulation in the data economy.

This post presents a 22-month infographic overview of how events are correlated with blocking of information related to Bo Xilai on Sina Weibo.

This report by Seth Hardy (Senior Security Analyst, Citizen Lab)
describes the technical details of client-side censorship functionality
in the LINE messenger client for Android, and a method for disabling it.
This post is the first in a series of research reports analyzing
information controls and privacy in mobile messaging applications used
in Asia. An introduction to the project can be found here

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.