Why does china censor the internet

TikTok is one of the largest and fastest-growing global social media platforms spun out of Beijing. It heavily moderates its content, and supposedly has localized censors for different jurisdictions. Internet users outside the United States may recognise the dynamic of a foreign service exporting its domestic decision-making abroad.

Most services obey DMCA takedown procedures of allegedly copyright-infringing content, even in countries that have had alternative resolution laws. That said, U. In China, domestic and foreign companies have been explicitly mandated to comply with Chinese censorship under the national Cybersecurity Law passed in , which provides aggressive yet vague guidelines for content moderation.

This means that China can use threats of boycotts or the denial of access to Chinese markets to silence these companies when they, or people affiliated with them, express support for the Hong Kong protestors. Already, people are fighting back against the imposition of Chinese censorship on global companies. Blizzard employees staged a walk-out in protest, NBA fans continue to voice their support for the demonstrations in Hong Kong, and fans are rallying to boycott the two companies.

China now projects its Internet power abroad through the pervasive and unabashed use of malware and state-supported DDoS attacks; mandated client-side filtering and surveillance; economic sanctions to limit cross-border free speech; and pressure on private entities to act as a global cultural police.

Unless lawmakers, corporations, and individual users are as brave in standing up to authoritarian acts as the people of Hong Kong, we can expect to see these tactics adopted by every state, against every user of the Internet. No new date has yet been set. The Alliance is a platform for collective capacity building and information, based on the principle that encryption is an essential tool for security and respect for human and My conditions are but a drop in a dark sea of injustice.

Refinement of China's technique of blocking websites based on keywords will allow Chinese access to all foreign news websites and only restrict the few web pages on the website which discuss politically sensitive issues. As China continues to embed itself in the global economy, it will increasingly employ targeted loosening of internet restrictions to keep freedom disposed foreigners from experiencing and subsequently becoming activists against the Great Firewall.

In James Fallows' recent Atlantic Monthly article, he relates confidential discussions he has had with the maintainers of the Great Firewall about how they intend to allow unrestricted internet access during the Summer Olympics to the Olympic village and various other hotels and cafes around Beijing which they expect westerners to frequent.

The censors' idea is that by not exposing outsiders to the Great Firewalls, they decrease the publicity that the Great Firewall receives, which correspondingly decreases the amount of outside opposition and pressure China receives over its internet censorship. These techniques will no doubt continue and expand as China tries to maintain its Great Firewall. The third way in which censorship in China will change is that the Chinese have been, and will continue to be, increasingly selective in what they try to censor.

Having grown up never hearing of or using international platforms such as Twitter and Google, they believe the Firewall has protected them from false information and the country from social instability.

But while the U. The way the state media depicts the U. Some examples of this new nationalism are absurd but largely harmless, like a storm of criticism that erupted around a famed infectious disease doctor for suggesting that Chinese children should have protein-rich eggs and milk for breakfast, rather than rice porridge.

But some nationalistic fervor has the potential for real-world harm. Recently, there have been renewed calls for the Chinese government to seize the opportunity created by the pandemic to take Taiwan by force. Videos and photos have also emerged of people, including children , warning or wishing for the deaths of Americans.

Of course, not all youth are strident nationalists. While rising nationalism in China is a reality and policymakers should take it seriously, they should also keep in mind that many in and from China live in silent fear, struggling with guilt for not speaking up.

At minimum, countries around the world should keep their universities, institutions and open societies supportive of and welcoming to those who want to learn and debate. Governments and institutions should also invest in overseas independent Chinese-language media—many young people inside the Great Firewall quietly find ways to jump over the wall to look for information—and technological tools that can be used to circumvent and even dismantle censorship.

Finally, they need to keep supporting journalists, writers and activists inside the country—the real agents of change. Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today.

Help us continue to fight human rights abuses. Please give now to support our work. Human Rights Watch. Donate Now. Take Action. Keyword filtering is the first line of defense for many ICPs. Keywords of either single words, phrases, or co-occurring words and phrases are set up to prevent searches, posts, or comments about off-limits content.

This form of review is done in two ways: through manual content review and algorithmic review. Technology firms are not only responsible for monitoring and censoring public social media content. They are also responsible for monitoring closed chat groups and even one-on-one conversations.

Thus, Chinese tech firms often employ thousands of content moderators to remove censored material. These moderators look for code words, slang, and memes that people use in order to get around the censors. For example, one such company named Beyondsoft uses a service called Rainbow Shield. This service has compiled over , basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words.

Of these words, about one-third are related to political content. Following are words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and politics. In China, the market share of foreign-owned search engines is low, as domestic players like Baidu and Sohu dominate the market. As they are the natural starting point for Internet users, these search engines are of high interest to censors. One method search engines use to censor the Internet is to filter the search results of prohibited terms.

Google for instance received widespread criticisms over its Dragonfly project and its rumored development of a Chinese censored search engine. Furthermore, Google has also removed advertisements on Chinese websites that review anti-censorship software. China has recruited thousands of individuals to search the internet and report problematic content to authorities. Additionally, there are specific groups and individuals that are given the task of manipulating the direction of internet discourse.

The Fifty-Cent army is a group of individuals are rumored to be paid per-post. This group of individuals consists of government organized persons and netizens given the task to steer online discussion on sensitive topics.

The most identifiable aspect of internet censorship in China is the ever-evolving list of banned terms and phrases. Entering these identified prohibited words into a search engine will return no results. Similarly, using these filtered terms in a social media post will result in machine-automated software flagging or deleting the content.

The best analyzed list of forbidden keywords comes from Sina Weibo. The list now contains almost The best analyzed list of forbidden keywords comes from Sina Weibo.

The list now contains almost 3, blacklisted words. Amazingly, it takes mere moments to block new terms. This allows Sina Weibo censors to respond in real-time to monitor new social media developments. This capability plays a large role in shaping the public discussion online.

However, keyword lists do not always result in automatic blocking or search restrictions. This is because there are usually different levels of keyword lists. At Sina Weibo there are three levels of keywords based on a combination of political sensitivity and the likelihood that a non-sensitive post will be flagged from the keyword.

At Sina , employees in charge of content moderation make most of the decisions about what is and what is not to be censored on their platform. First, posts are flagged and sent to content moderators through keywords.