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China scours social media, erases thousands of accounts

98 points by dustinmoris 8y ago

threatofrain 8y ago
> The term “self-media” is mostly used on Chinese social media to describe independent news accounts that produce original content but are not officially registered with the authorities.
steenreem 8y ago
So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible? I imagine a system where you publish news using your device (a mobile phone), and encrypted in a way so that only a small group of other devices, which you have explicitly trusted in an earlier step, can decrypt it, allowing only them to trace that the news came from you. Then those trusted devices will decrypt and re-encrypt the news in such that they can forward it with only their trusted devices. When a device receives news from another, then it won't know whether the sender published that news, or is merely forwarding it. Because all communication between devices is encrypted, a device can not be confirmed to be using this system, except by a device who he trusts. When a device is compromised, he will only be able to see if another device is part of the system, if that device has trusted him. Also the compromised device will be able to read news shared to him, but he won't be able to see what device that news originates from. To make sure that readers can filter news based on what publishers they like, there is the concept of a publisher. Apart from news, devices can also share publishers. An publisher is a name plus public key. The creator of the publisher has the private key with which he can encrypt news (even before it encrypted for sharing), allowing readers of that news, who have the publisher's public key, to verify that the news came from that publisher. If a publisher is shared with a device while the device already knows a publisher with the same public key, then the device must chose which publisher to keep and which to delete.
- DevX101 8y ago
  Keep in mind that a sufficiently motivated and powerful state (China comes to mind) could block any messages that appear to be encrypted. In such a case, bad state actors would not be able to decipher the message, but they could determine that you attempted to send an unlawful message. US had stringent regulations on high levels of cryptography until recently, so the U.S. isn't immune to this train of thought either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
  - Macuyiko 8y ago
    Indeed. Or they would just pass by the app developer to have a tea and 'request' a backdoor. All these armchair technical solutions are nice to conjure up, but at the end of the day it's not the technical aspect which is the challenge.
    - tachyonbeam 8y ago
      xkcd comic comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ It's true that technical solutions are not a solution to tyranny. I still think it's good that these solutions might give a slight advantage to people who could make a difference.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible? Tangentially, should it be impossible? We can all imagine scenarios where we might think that actually some information should be withheld or erased.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    This is an interesting question; almost everyone agrees that real child pornography should be censored, but there is only varying agreement (among liberals) on the matter of state secrets, intellectual property, assault, calls to violence...
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Interesting watching the votes go up and down. There are those who strongly disagree; an axiom upon which to burn the whole world and all the people in it, one might say.
- hevi_jos 8y ago
  I believe you are forgetting something important: humans. You are focusing in technology without people. Technology without people does not work. Specially in China: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png Most devices in China cheap enough are compromised as they are manufactured by the Government, the channel is compromised. The apps are compromised, social media is compromised. You can trust no body but your family, as simple as that, not even your family as the Government can blackmail them.
- wcoenen 8y ago
  There is already a stronger version of this where you don't need to trust any nodes: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en China attempts to detect and block such TOR connections. It's an arms race of detection heuristics vs traffic obfuscation.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  This is how China would attack such a system: Declare use and possession of it illegal. Randomly search for it among people who they think might have it. Once they find people using it, they punish them very harshly, and widely publicize the consequences of using such a system. Then people will stop using it, because CPC is more than willing to ratchet up the penalties and enforcement until that happens. Up to summary death penalty and massive dragnets where military descends on an area to search every device they find. (The fact that everyone knows they would go that far means they'd never have to.) There are no technical solutions to tyranny. You can think of such a system working because you live in a country where there is likely a constitution that prevents governments from banning apps they don't like without any actual real justification, and where there are laws that prevent anything you have from being seized for inspection just because the people doing the inspection feel like it. There is plenty of dissent of all kinds in China. But the locals would never do something so brazen as to start using an app specifically designed to make their communication uncensorable. Because that would be a direct challenge to the state, and the state has a very well documented, extremely blood-soaked history of winning direct challenges through applying brute force. Instead, the dissent uses the officially approved channels, and stays near the officially approved limits.
  - anon57325 8y ago
    Such a system could also be attacked in a democracy. Just look at how the US government handled the Liberty Dollar. It would be even easier now with National Security Letters and Secret Courts. Heck, look what happened to Lavabit.
    - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
      True. My point was that in a democracy, it would be attacked in a different way, and the post I was replying to was thinking about defending from the kind of attacks that would be done in a democracy. China has other tools.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- abc-xyz 8y ago
  Right now I think GitHub is the best way to share news that the Chinese government doesn't like, because it's the only Western platform that they rely on and are afraid to ban.. that being said, I doubt a Microsoft-owned GitHub will protect the users the same way GitHub did before the acquisition.
  - flap 8y ago
    too late, github is already banned in China
    - abc-xyz 8y ago
      No it's not. Just asked my friends in China and tested with https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedinchina/ https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin... (try with github.com and reddit.com). The Chinese are heavily invested in GitHub, so if/when they do ban it then you can be sure it won't go unnoticed.
      - yorwba 8y ago
        GitHub has been banned in the past and yes it didn't go unnoticed ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700 ), but that's not much consolation when you suddenly can't access it. Currently they mostly don't block it ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/github.com https://en.greatfire.org/https/github.com ), but if GitHub ever became popular among ordinary citizens (as opposed to programmers) downloading e.g. censorship circumvention tools from GitHub, they'd probably find a way to mirror most git repos, except those they want to block.
        abc-xyz 8y ago
        Indeed, and they've resorted to DDoSing GitHub precisely because it's so difficult (in terms of value lost) for them to block it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub). Sure, they could setup a selfhosted GitLab and mirror repos, but doing so would severely hurt them.
- dangerboysteve 8y ago
  Hey, Will this tarnish my social credit score ?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- apatters 8y ago
  It bears mentioning that services like Radio Free Asia have been broadcasting into China via shortwave and have been an uncensored source of news for decades. Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to jam these broadcasts, I'm not sure how successful those efforts are in 2018. I suspect more funding for these organizations can only help however. (Bonus fact: Radio Free Asia contributed most of the initial funding for the development of the Signal protocol!)
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    > Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. My sense is that analog methods are the best response to authoritarian regimes; and the best way to prepare for the advent of one is to familiarize yourself with analog spy trade-craft (and analog response to digital spying, like disguise). Speaking of which, does anyone have any non-fiction book recommendations about analog spycraft and responses to authoritarianism? Things like how to do dead drops, samizdat, clandestine distribution of literature and the like?
    - lic-defender 8y ago
      I'd like to hear more about this, too. I would probably start looking for non-fiction about the Soviet Union and East Germany. My intuition is that the human factor is more important than the spycraft. In other words, how do you know who agrees with you politically? How do you know if you can trust them? They could be an informant for the police. There's a scene from The Man In The High Castle season 1 where some of the Japanese are trying to figure out if the antique salesman shares their political beliefs. To give an opening, they ask questions sort of in the subject area, but plausibly deniable. He fails the test, but even if he passes, he can't just come straight out. It would be based on subtleties of words, facial expressions, attitude, maybe a joke in response. Even then, he's better off if there's not a Nest or an Alexa recording the whole thing. Related, I heard about a man who was handing out political brochures on a street in the Soviet Union. Before too long, the police came and took him into custody. To their surprise, the brochures were blank inside. When they asked the man what was going on, he said, "everyone already knows!". But they can't talk about it.
- wnscooke 8y ago
  They can turn off the Internet. They've done it before in Xinjiang. Just, poof, no more internet or mobile data connections! The only thing that worked were roaming sims from HK, but even those were targetted and blocked after some time.
21 8y ago
It's comming. The left in the west is demanding laws to ban anonymous social media posting, to stop online abuse. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/angela-rayner-ban-anonymous-social-media-abuse-labour-facebook-twitter-a8551716.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/angela-rayner...
paraditedc 8y ago
Reuters shortened version: > The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement that the campaign, launched on Oct. 20, had erased the accounts for violations that included “spreading politically harmful information, maliciously falsifying (Chinese Communist) party history, slandering heroes and defaming the nation’s image.” Full paragraph [1] translated from Google Translate: > According to the investigation, most of these dispositioned self-media accounts are on the WeChat Weibo platform, and some of them are also installed on today's headlines, Baidu, Sohu, Phoenix, UC and other platforms. Some spread politically harmful information, maliciously tampering with the history of the party history, smashing heroes, and discrediting the image of the state; some making rumors, spreading false information, acting as a "heading party" to profit, to attract attention, and to disrupt normal social order. Some arbitrarily spread vulgar pornography, violate public order and good customs, challenge the moral bottom line, and damage the healthy growth of the majority of young people; some use the hands of a large number of self-media account malicious marketing, engage in "black public relations", extortion, infringement of normal business or individual legality Equity, challenge the legal bottom line; some arbitrarily plagiarize infringement, smear the powder, build false traffic, and disrupt the normal order of communication. These self-media chaos seriously violated the dignity of laws and regulations, harmed the interests of the broad masses of the people, undermined the ecology of good network public opinion, and the society reflected strongly. [1] Source in Chinese: http://www.cac.gov.cn/2018-11/12/c_1123702179.htm http://www.cac.gov.cn/2018-11/12/c_1123702179.htm
echevil 8y ago
The problem of individual news media accounts in China is that they are a major source of fake news, disinformation, and often uses exaggerated titles or suggestive images. I’ve seen too many of those articles floating around social networks. When a western media reports this, of course it is yet another way that Chinese government “suppresses information”. But the reality is, the effort of fighting these content just what Facebook is doing right now.
- educationdata 8y ago
  It is so ridiculous to claim individual news media accounts in China as "a major source of fake news, disinformation", when in fact the government official news media is shamelessly spreading fake news every single day on TV and newspaper, and they have the total control over how you report major events. The government controls what can be reported, how it shall and shall not be reported. You blame individual news media accounts? For example, the government is sending massive amount of people (village by village) to reeducation camps in Xinjiang province. Do you think the official news media will report any of this? Do you think any formal report from serious journalists will be allowed to appear on news media? Of course not! So yes, there are all kinds of rumors about Xinjiang in individual news media accounts. Who should we put the blame on?
  - echevil 8y ago
    If you ever actually read the articles published from these media accounts, you'll easily see how "Not ridiculous" the claim is. (Of course there're plenty good ones, I'm not blaming all news media accounts, but there're way too many harmful ones) The problem of these media in China is not exactly the same as the those on Facebook, but it's way more common and cause lots of harm - e.g. a large portion of these articles are influencing people to buy / not buy certain product in a very problematic way. There is no reason these news media accounts should not be regulated. e.g. You should not publish fake news intentionally misleading the public. (Otherwise why not just let Russians publish whatever ads they want to influence American election whichever way they want?) In western news reports, this is of course "controlling what can be reported and what cannot", and they won't tell you the full story. I just wanted to point out, a large part of this is actually fighting a real problem for the good.
claydavisss 8y ago
In the West meanwhile, most internet firms have permitted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private, partisan organization to define "hate" online, and to help purge it. Be careful, you could end up raising the ire of a lawyer at the SPLC, like the British (Muslim) academic who was researching radicalization of youth in his own culture [0] Oddly enough in most of the US now, allowing private organizations to squelch legit free expression is considered a progressive victory. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-nawaz-v-splc/562646/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-...
- tabtab 8y ago
  You have to admit that open-ended free speech that allows one to say, "Your culture/people are inferior lazy violent criminals" is disturbing. Such is rarely constructive and just stokes sectarian divides. The worse wars often start that way, and Europe had the living daylights bombed out of them because of such. I can understand why they'd ban it. It's pretty close to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. A slow fire is still a fire. I will agree it may not be enforced evenly by the big social media companies. If one rants about "gun-crazy ignorant rednecks", that should be treated just as ethnically offensive as the usual culprits. The left can be hypocrites that way. However, equal enforcement would require banning the Orange Guy.
  - lic-defender 8y ago
    Listen to yourself: "We have to censor all possible communication methods and imprison people for words because jokes about Montenegrins being lazy are going to cause World War 3". "Calling a gun-crazy redneck a gun-crazy redneck is hate speech and subject to a fine of no greater than $5000 or no greater than 30 days in jail".
    - tabtab 8y ago
      You don't have to jail people immediately. Give them a stern warning. If they do it again, THEN jail them. Re: "[Silly that] jokes about Montenegrins being lazy are going to cause World War 3" -- A line has to be drawn somewhere. If the context is jokes, maybe let it go. But if it's part of a political rant that certain people should be discriminated against or removed, then a line is crossed. Maybe if you had the daylights bombed out of your community like in WW2, you'd have a different perspective. Fully free speech is nice, but so is being alive. Dead people have no speech.
qubax 8y ago
Why wouldn't china fight against "hate" speech? I find it hilarious that the hypocritical news industry and the leftists mock china for their censorship while they themselves advocate for censorship in the US. Of course both the chinese government and our leftists use the same condescending patronizing authoritarian excuse - "it's for our own good". No thanks. Wish all the leftists in the US would go to china - their paradise. And of course hollywood and most of our corporations encourage leftist censorship because they want access to the chinese market. What better way to win the hearts and minds of the chinese government than to show how well they censor at home.
- scrollbar 8y ago
  Literally the first sentence on this page describe the censored content as "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content." Your argument that this is the same as the desire for blocking legitimate hate speech in the US is simply political inflammation. It's not at all the same. Please stop.
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    I'm sure the people who think they can determine for the rest of us what is "legitimate" hate speech, find it "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content."
  - qubax 8y ago
    > Literally the first sentence on this page describe the censored content as "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content." I know. Hate speech. Also, isn't that the same list that social media like facebook, reddit, etc use to censor now because leftists demanded it? > Your argument that this is the same as the desire for blocking legitimate hate speech in the US is simply political inflammation Wait. So who determines what is hate speech? You? > It's not at all the same. Please stop. It is the same. So please stop. Free speech doesn't exist to protect speech you agree with. It exists to protect speech you disagree with. It exists to protect hate speech. Everything is hate speech if you actually bother to think about it. Is LGBT speech hate speech to muslims? What about speech against flat earthers? If I say that the earth is round, is that hate speech? "Hate speech" is just an excuse used by tyrannical puritans to justify censorship speech they don't like.
majia 8y ago
Another way to make censorship impossible: Ask all governmental, educational and technological websites to provide VPN services or links to other VPN services. If China wants to implement censorship, it has to ban all these websites that are essential for its economic development.
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > Another way to make censorship impossible: Ask all governmental, educational and technological websites to provide VPN services or links to other VPN services. If China wants to implement censorship, it has to ban all these websites that are essential for its economic development. Censorship is always possible. You can make it more expensive, but the censoring regime could just decide to bear the cost. The PRC government may decide that China has developed enough that they no longer need to provide any access to the worldwide internet to their general population. They could switch the Great Firewall to default-deny mode, and only whitelist the minimum number of services they need to keep their economy running. I think that list is much smaller than a lot of people would assume, given the domestic coercive power of the Chinese state and willingness of foreign businesses to bend to its rules.
  - pas 8y ago
    Chinese providers' external connections are already shit, firewall or not. Foreign language knowledge is not important for most of the population, and thus the Chinese internet simply gets more and more isolated.
prolikewh0a 8y ago
USA is doing this too, but it gets reported on entirely differently. Facebook & Twitter are banning domestic American citizen accounts for simply acting like "Russians", whatever that means. They aren't claimed to be hate accounts either, it's just raw censorship. They won't provide example accounts so we can research what they're banning specifically. I'm not sure why everyone thinks this is OK, but coddles their cozy propaganda blankets when China is doing it. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-online-disinformation.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  You glossed over the meaningful difference. In China it is the government, in the US it is private companies which enjoy freedoms to associate with whomever they want. I happen to disagree with all these banned accounts, but I still believe in freedom to be an asshole (posting as one, or running a company as one).
  - bordercases 8y ago
    This is false in the practical sense of having board member commitments plus court cases interacting with the big corporations. At that point the will between corporation and government may be in tension, but they should not considered separable that we can say either are actually "free" to act how they want.
- pas 8y ago
  Twitter and FB are private businesses, China is a state. The US state is not deleting nor forcing or requesting deletion of accounts. Russian propaganda bots are that, propaganda bots. Hate speech is a different issue.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    In the USA we let capitalism do our dirty deeds so that gov't doesn't have to :-)

98 points by dustinmoris 8y ago

> The term “self-media” is mostly used on Chinese social media to describe independent news accounts that produce original content but are not officially registered with the authorities.

steenreem 8y ago

So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible? I imagine a system where you publish news using your device (a mobile phone), and encrypted in a way so that only a small group of other devices, which you have explicitly trusted in an earlier step, can decrypt it, allowing only them to trace that the news came from you. Then those trusted devices will decrypt and re-encrypt the news in such that they can forward it with only their trusted devices. When a device receives news from another, then it won't know whether the sender published that news, or is merely forwarding it. Because all communication between devices is encrypted, a device can not be confirmed to be using this system, except by a device who he trusts. When a device is compromised, he will only be able to see if another device is part of the system, if that device has trusted him. Also the compromised device will be able to read news shared to him, but he won't be able to see what device that news originates from. To make sure that readers can filter news based on what publishers they like, there is the concept of a publisher. Apart from news, devices can also share publishers. An publisher is a name plus public key. The creator of the publisher has the private key with which he can encrypt news (even before it encrypted for sharing), allowing readers of that news, who have the publisher's public key, to verify that the news came from that publisher. If a publisher is shared with a device while the device already knows a publisher with the same public key, then the device must chose which publisher to keep and which to delete.

DevX101 8y ago
Keep in mind that a sufficiently motivated and powerful state (China comes to mind) could block any messages that appear to be encrypted. In such a case, bad state actors would not be able to decipher the message, but they could determine that you attempted to send an unlawful message. US had stringent regulations on high levels of cryptography until recently, so the U.S. isn't immune to this train of thought either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
- Macuyiko 8y ago
  Indeed. Or they would just pass by the app developer to have a tea and 'request' a backdoor. All these armchair technical solutions are nice to conjure up, but at the end of the day it's not the technical aspect which is the challenge.
  - tachyonbeam 8y ago
    xkcd comic comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ It's true that technical solutions are not a solution to tyranny. I still think it's good that these solutions might give a slight advantage to people who could make a difference.
EliRivers 8y ago
So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible? Tangentially, should it be impossible? We can all imagine scenarios where we might think that actually some information should be withheld or erased.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  This is an interesting question; almost everyone agrees that real child pornography should be censored, but there is only varying agreement (among liberals) on the matter of state secrets, intellectual property, assault, calls to violence...
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Interesting watching the votes go up and down. There are those who strongly disagree; an axiom upon which to burn the whole world and all the people in it, one might say.
hevi_jos 8y ago
I believe you are forgetting something important: humans. You are focusing in technology without people. Technology without people does not work. Specially in China: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png Most devices in China cheap enough are compromised as they are manufactured by the Government, the channel is compromised. The apps are compromised, social media is compromised. You can trust no body but your family, as simple as that, not even your family as the Government can blackmail them.
wcoenen 8y ago
There is already a stronger version of this where you don't need to trust any nodes: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en China attempts to detect and block such TOR connections. It's an arms race of detection heuristics vs traffic obfuscation.
Tuna-Fish 8y ago
This is how China would attack such a system: Declare use and possession of it illegal. Randomly search for it among people who they think might have it. Once they find people using it, they punish them very harshly, and widely publicize the consequences of using such a system. Then people will stop using it, because CPC is more than willing to ratchet up the penalties and enforcement until that happens. Up to summary death penalty and massive dragnets where military descends on an area to search every device they find. (The fact that everyone knows they would go that far means they'd never have to.) There are no technical solutions to tyranny. You can think of such a system working because you live in a country where there is likely a constitution that prevents governments from banning apps they don't like without any actual real justification, and where there are laws that prevent anything you have from being seized for inspection just because the people doing the inspection feel like it. There is plenty of dissent of all kinds in China. But the locals would never do something so brazen as to start using an app specifically designed to make their communication uncensorable. Because that would be a direct challenge to the state, and the state has a very well documented, extremely blood-soaked history of winning direct challenges through applying brute force. Instead, the dissent uses the officially approved channels, and stays near the officially approved limits.
- anon57325 8y ago
  Such a system could also be attacked in a democracy. Just look at how the US government handled the Liberty Dollar. It would be even easier now with National Security Letters and Secret Courts. Heck, look what happened to Lavabit.
  - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
    True. My point was that in a democracy, it would be attacked in a different way, and the post I was replying to was thinking about defending from the kind of attacks that would be done in a democracy. China has other tools.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
abc-xyz 8y ago
Right now I think GitHub is the best way to share news that the Chinese government doesn't like, because it's the only Western platform that they rely on and are afraid to ban.. that being said, I doubt a Microsoft-owned GitHub will protect the users the same way GitHub did before the acquisition.
- flap 8y ago
  too late, github is already banned in China
  - abc-xyz 8y ago
    No it's not. Just asked my friends in China and tested with https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedinchina/ https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin... (try with github.com and reddit.com). The Chinese are heavily invested in GitHub, so if/when they do ban it then you can be sure it won't go unnoticed.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      GitHub has been banned in the past and yes it didn't go unnoticed ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700 ), but that's not much consolation when you suddenly can't access it. Currently they mostly don't block it ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/github.com https://en.greatfire.org/https/github.com ), but if GitHub ever became popular among ordinary citizens (as opposed to programmers) downloading e.g. censorship circumvention tools from GitHub, they'd probably find a way to mirror most git repos, except those they want to block.
      - abc-xyz 8y ago
        Indeed, and they've resorted to DDoSing GitHub precisely because it's so difficult (in terms of value lost) for them to block it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub). Sure, they could setup a selfhosted GitLab and mirror repos, but doing so would severely hurt them.
dangerboysteve 8y ago
Hey, Will this tarnish my social credit score ?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
apatters 8y ago
It bears mentioning that services like Radio Free Asia have been broadcasting into China via shortwave and have been an uncensored source of news for decades. Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to jam these broadcasts, I'm not sure how successful those efforts are in 2018. I suspect more funding for these organizations can only help however. (Bonus fact: Radio Free Asia contributed most of the initial funding for the development of the Signal protocol!)
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. My sense is that analog methods are the best response to authoritarian regimes; and the best way to prepare for the advent of one is to familiarize yourself with analog spy trade-craft (and analog response to digital spying, like disguise). Speaking of which, does anyone have any non-fiction book recommendations about analog spycraft and responses to authoritarianism? Things like how to do dead drops, samizdat, clandestine distribution of literature and the like?
  - lic-defender 8y ago
    I'd like to hear more about this, too. I would probably start looking for non-fiction about the Soviet Union and East Germany. My intuition is that the human factor is more important than the spycraft. In other words, how do you know who agrees with you politically? How do you know if you can trust them? They could be an informant for the police. There's a scene from The Man In The High Castle season 1 where some of the Japanese are trying to figure out if the antique salesman shares their political beliefs. To give an opening, they ask questions sort of in the subject area, but plausibly deniable. He fails the test, but even if he passes, he can't just come straight out. It would be based on subtleties of words, facial expressions, attitude, maybe a joke in response. Even then, he's better off if there's not a Nest or an Alexa recording the whole thing. Related, I heard about a man who was handing out political brochures on a street in the Soviet Union. Before too long, the police came and took him into custody. To their surprise, the brochures were blank inside. When they asked the man what was going on, he said, "everyone already knows!". But they can't talk about it.
wnscooke 8y ago
They can turn off the Internet. They've done it before in Xinjiang. Just, poof, no more internet or mobile data connections! The only thing that worked were roaming sims from HK, but even those were targetted and blocked after some time.

21 8y ago

It's comming. The left in the west is demanding laws to ban anonymous social media posting, to stop online abuse. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/angela-rayner-ban-anonymous-social-media-abuse-labour-facebook-twitter-a8551716.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/angela-rayner...

paraditedc 8y ago

Reuters shortened version: > The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement that the campaign, launched on Oct. 20, had erased the accounts for violations that included “spreading politically harmful information, maliciously falsifying (Chinese Communist) party history, slandering heroes and defaming the nation’s image.” Full paragraph [1] translated from Google Translate: > According to the investigation, most of these dispositioned self-media accounts are on the WeChat Weibo platform, and some of them are also installed on today's headlines, Baidu, Sohu, Phoenix, UC and other platforms. Some spread politically harmful information, maliciously tampering with the history of the party history, smashing heroes, and discrediting the image of the state; some making rumors, spreading false information, acting as a "heading party" to profit, to attract attention, and to disrupt normal social order. Some arbitrarily spread vulgar pornography, violate public order and good customs, challenge the moral bottom line, and damage the healthy growth of the majority of young people; some use the hands of a large number of self-media account malicious marketing, engage in "black public relations", extortion, infringement of normal business or individual legality Equity, challenge the legal bottom line; some arbitrarily plagiarize infringement, smear the powder, build false traffic, and disrupt the normal order of communication. These self-media chaos seriously violated the dignity of laws and regulations, harmed the interests of the broad masses of the people, undermined the ecology of good network public opinion, and the society reflected strongly. [1] Source in Chinese: http://www.cac.gov.cn/2018-11/12/c_1123702179.htm http://www.cac.gov.cn/2018-11/12/c_1123702179.htm

echevil 8y ago

The problem of individual news media accounts in China is that they are a major source of fake news, disinformation, and often uses exaggerated titles or suggestive images. I’ve seen too many of those articles floating around social networks. When a western media reports this, of course it is yet another way that Chinese government “suppresses information”. But the reality is, the effort of fighting these content just what Facebook is doing right now.

educationdata 8y ago
It is so ridiculous to claim individual news media accounts in China as "a major source of fake news, disinformation", when in fact the government official news media is shamelessly spreading fake news every single day on TV and newspaper, and they have the total control over how you report major events. The government controls what can be reported, how it shall and shall not be reported. You blame individual news media accounts? For example, the government is sending massive amount of people (village by village) to reeducation camps in Xinjiang province. Do you think the official news media will report any of this? Do you think any formal report from serious journalists will be allowed to appear on news media? Of course not! So yes, there are all kinds of rumors about Xinjiang in individual news media accounts. Who should we put the blame on?
- echevil 8y ago
  If you ever actually read the articles published from these media accounts, you'll easily see how "Not ridiculous" the claim is. (Of course there're plenty good ones, I'm not blaming all news media accounts, but there're way too many harmful ones) The problem of these media in China is not exactly the same as the those on Facebook, but it's way more common and cause lots of harm - e.g. a large portion of these articles are influencing people to buy / not buy certain product in a very problematic way. There is no reason these news media accounts should not be regulated. e.g. You should not publish fake news intentionally misleading the public. (Otherwise why not just let Russians publish whatever ads they want to influence American election whichever way they want?) In western news reports, this is of course "controlling what can be reported and what cannot", and they won't tell you the full story. I just wanted to point out, a large part of this is actually fighting a real problem for the good.

claydavisss 8y ago

In the West meanwhile, most internet firms have permitted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private, partisan organization to define "hate" online, and to help purge it. Be careful, you could end up raising the ire of a lawyer at the SPLC, like the British (Muslim) academic who was researching radicalization of youth in his own culture [0] Oddly enough in most of the US now, allowing private organizations to squelch legit free expression is considered a progressive victory. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-nawaz-v-splc/562646/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-...

tabtab 8y ago
You have to admit that open-ended free speech that allows one to say, "Your culture/people are inferior lazy violent criminals" is disturbing. Such is rarely constructive and just stokes sectarian divides. The worse wars often start that way, and Europe had the living daylights bombed out of them because of such. I can understand why they'd ban it. It's pretty close to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. A slow fire is still a fire. I will agree it may not be enforced evenly by the big social media companies. If one rants about "gun-crazy ignorant rednecks", that should be treated just as ethnically offensive as the usual culprits. The left can be hypocrites that way. However, equal enforcement would require banning the Orange Guy.
- lic-defender 8y ago
  Listen to yourself: "We have to censor all possible communication methods and imprison people for words because jokes about Montenegrins being lazy are going to cause World War 3". "Calling a gun-crazy redneck a gun-crazy redneck is hate speech and subject to a fine of no greater than $5000 or no greater than 30 days in jail".
  - tabtab 8y ago
    You don't have to jail people immediately. Give them a stern warning. If they do it again, THEN jail them. Re: "[Silly that] jokes about Montenegrins being lazy are going to cause World War 3" -- A line has to be drawn somewhere. If the context is jokes, maybe let it go. But if it's part of a political rant that certain people should be discriminated against or removed, then a line is crossed. Maybe if you had the daylights bombed out of your community like in WW2, you'd have a different perspective. Fully free speech is nice, but so is being alive. Dead people have no speech.

qubax 8y ago

Why wouldn't china fight against "hate" speech? I find it hilarious that the hypocritical news industry and the leftists mock china for their censorship while they themselves advocate for censorship in the US. Of course both the chinese government and our leftists use the same condescending patronizing authoritarian excuse - "it's for our own good". No thanks. Wish all the leftists in the US would go to china - their paradise. And of course hollywood and most of our corporations encourage leftist censorship because they want access to the chinese market. What better way to win the hearts and minds of the chinese government than to show how well they censor at home.

scrollbar 8y ago
Literally the first sentence on this page describe the censored content as "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content." Your argument that this is the same as the desire for blocking legitimate hate speech in the US is simply political inflammation. It's not at all the same. Please stop.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  I'm sure the people who think they can determine for the rest of us what is "legitimate" hate speech, find it "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content."
- qubax 8y ago
  > Literally the first sentence on this page describe the censored content as "sensational, vulgar or politically harmful content." I know. Hate speech. Also, isn't that the same list that social media like facebook, reddit, etc use to censor now because leftists demanded it? > Your argument that this is the same as the desire for blocking legitimate hate speech in the US is simply political inflammation Wait. So who determines what is hate speech? You? > It's not at all the same. Please stop. It is the same. So please stop. Free speech doesn't exist to protect speech you agree with. It exists to protect speech you disagree with. It exists to protect hate speech. Everything is hate speech if you actually bother to think about it. Is LGBT speech hate speech to muslims? What about speech against flat earthers? If I say that the earth is round, is that hate speech? "Hate speech" is just an excuse used by tyrannical puritans to justify censorship speech they don't like.

majia 8y ago

Another way to make censorship impossible: Ask all governmental, educational and technological websites to provide VPN services or links to other VPN services. If China wants to implement censorship, it has to ban all these websites that are essential for its economic development.

eiaoa 8y ago
> Another way to make censorship impossible: Ask all governmental, educational and technological websites to provide VPN services or links to other VPN services. If China wants to implement censorship, it has to ban all these websites that are essential for its economic development. Censorship is always possible. You can make it more expensive, but the censoring regime could just decide to bear the cost. The PRC government may decide that China has developed enough that they no longer need to provide any access to the worldwide internet to their general population. They could switch the Great Firewall to default-deny mode, and only whitelist the minimum number of services they need to keep their economy running. I think that list is much smaller than a lot of people would assume, given the domestic coercive power of the Chinese state and willingness of foreign businesses to bend to its rules.
- pas 8y ago
  Chinese providers' external connections are already shit, firewall or not. Foreign language knowledge is not important for most of the population, and thus the Chinese internet simply gets more and more isolated.

prolikewh0a 8y ago

USA is doing this too, but it gets reported on entirely differently. Facebook & Twitter are banning domestic American citizen accounts for simply acting like "Russians", whatever that means. They aren't claimed to be hate accounts either, it's just raw censorship. They won't provide example accounts so we can research what they're banning specifically. I'm not sure why everyone thinks this is OK, but coddles their cozy propaganda blankets when China is doing it. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-online-disinformation.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...

merpnderp 8y ago
You glossed over the meaningful difference. In China it is the government, in the US it is private companies which enjoy freedoms to associate with whomever they want. I happen to disagree with all these banned accounts, but I still believe in freedom to be an asshole (posting as one, or running a company as one).
- bordercases 8y ago
  This is false in the practical sense of having board member commitments plus court cases interacting with the big corporations. At that point the will between corporation and government may be in tension, but they should not considered separable that we can say either are actually "free" to act how they want.
pas 8y ago
Twitter and FB are private businesses, China is a state. The US state is not deleting nor forcing or requesting deletion of accounts. Russian propaganda bots are that, propaganda bots. Hate speech is a different issue.
- tabtab 8y ago
  In the USA we let capitalism do our dirty deeds so that gov't doesn't have to :-)