Censorship in China is a fascinating topic for me, because it's an area where we can use technology to figure out things about social issues on the other side o

Censorship in China is a fascinating topic for me, because it's an area where we can use technology to figure out things about social issues on the other side of the world. A great example of this is cases where chat clients use client-side censorship lists; in this case you can extract the entire list and essentially have a rich source of words the Chinese government is concerned about. For example (following on some excellent work by CitizenLab [1]), I recently extracted the LINE IM client's list of banned words [2]. The entries there are fascinating to read through; you get the feeling that there's a whole story behind many of them that's waiting to be told. Take for example, "江蟾蜍", which Google Translate glosses as "river toad". It turns out that this refers to an incident where a large inflatable toad was placed in Beijing's Yuyuantan Park [3], which someone then realized looked like former president Jiang Zemin. I'm hoping to do more research reverse engineering Chinese censorship lists, hopefully even finding ways to efficiently probe server-side lists as well. [1] https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regionally-based-keyword-censorship-line/ https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regi... [2] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~brendan/line.txt http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~brendan/line.txt [3] http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/river-crabbed-toad-story/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/river-crabbed-toad-stor...