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Researchers Put Numbers On China's Microblog Censorship
eldavojohn writes "One of China's main microblogging services used by 30% of all Chinese internet users is called Sina Weibo (weibo is the Chinese word for 'microblog') and something that is quite different from the West's twitter is, of course, the enforced censorship. Researchers at Rice University in Houston have estimated numbers for how censorship works and identifies the 'velocity of censorship' in China's microblogging censorship. Most of the posts are marked as 'permission denied' between the five minute and ten minute marks after posting. Their research shows that 'If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that's a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.' The research indicates you would need a small army to meet stringent censorship policies when servicing China and to avoid being shutdown like Fanfou (another weibo). Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo. So the research examines the speed of ex post facto censorship which presumably requires an employee or perhaps government employee to identify 'non-harmonious' posts based on their intrinsic content."
Such an army of people would be wasteful and I've never heard it discussed anywhere. So, it must be a strong A.I..
They most likely have a system of forbidden phrases, that stop you from posting at all, and a list of phrases and words that need to be checked. All the posters who use one of those will then be put to the top of the immediate review column, which will get censored within a few minutes.
I'm amazed if this system actually exists. There are more people writing these microblogs than reading them. If you pay censors to read them then it just means more people that are likely to revolt or join a revolt.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis
This seems appropriate to the situation, as a good many in that culture genuinely believe that the censorship performed is not only necessary, but beneficial to their society.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Sorry to sound rude but "Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee"! I'm "Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee" tired of this "Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee" censorship!!!
* http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-technology-and-liberty/political-speech-facebook
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/06/facebook-apologises-free-speech-syria
* http://gawker.com/5885714/
* http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/19/richard-metzger-how.html
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/21/facebook-nudity-violence-censorship-guidelines
I could keep pasting these all day long but I think I made my point.
How do you prefer your censorship?
Overt or covert?
And the same could be asked of surveillance.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82701103/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED
Plomo o plata, I think journalism/blogs/social media are as censored in Russia, Europe and America as it is in China.
The tactics might differ but the strategy is consistent.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Here is yet another post about Chinese censorship, yet on Slashdot even polite comments with no swear words are deleted within an hour if they do not take part in Slashdot groupthink and/or provide a unique or unpopular perspective on matters.
Of course writing this comment is futile too since it will most likely be deleted by Slashdot censors. Hypocrites.
(of course, never ever mention Europe or elsewhere when commenting on articles about USA censorship, that's a no-no and Off-Topic!)
"Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo."
Yeah, because computers can find keywords, but throw in a couple spaces, and then it's impossible.
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine. The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords
Even if a human has to 'disapprove', a computer with keyword search can help this process. Pick the posts that may be offensive, present to the censors. This helps a lot, censors won't have to wade through food recipes, car repair tips or fashion blogs. On the other hand, people are cheap in China...
And each message will be read by (at most) one person. Not a terribly efficient way to spread ideas.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
YM "and to avoid being shut down".
'shutdown' is a noun.
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine.
That's why it takes five to ten minutes? Yeah? I don't know what sort of improvements you've made on top of latent semantic analysis or if you've completely scrapped that and revolutionized natural language parsing but, by all means, publish your work so the rest of us can bask in your divine glory. A job at Google should be the least of your goals -- usurping Google as an advertising giant would flow naturally from being able to automatically "understand" with a high recall and accuracy rate what people are writing in microblogs.
The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
It's funny you should use the phrase "hold water" when discussing how viable a large army of mindless internet users would be.
My work here is dung.
Lenny Bruce
“If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.”
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
(Besides the obvious political ones.)
In the US, this would be viewed as something requiring A.I. research. In China, another 5,000 or even 10,000 people get an "iron rice-bowl."
Foxcon could handle this with their staff on break.
The reason why weibo is so seriously censored is that it has become an official microblog tool. many provinces have opened weibo accounts to announce new policies or report breaking news.
but at the same time it is also the #1 microblog service. It has the most users. If the government don't want people know some unharmony news then it will order SINA to add some key words to blacklist.
The whole process is invisible to the public and the consorship has no law or rules.
What I fear now is that does SINA also delete posts themselves(without the orders from government)? A recent incident confirmed this: days ago SINA was accused by NETEASE for copying their blog content, then SINA blocked keywords searching about this on WEIBO.COM. This gets many critisize on the internet
It's always hilarious to see the West, in particular the USA, land of the free, act all righteous and point out how bad the Chinese are.
Um, they don't care about false positive, and at the VERY LEAST an automated system could be the first line to flag posts for review by a human, drastically reducing the workload. In short dcollins is correct.
That's why it takes five to ten minutes?
It takes 5-10 minutes because the automatic scanner sorts into three categories:
1. Stuff that clearly violates the rules.
2. Stuff that may violate the rules.
3. Stuff that looks okay.
So anything in (1) gets banned by the computer. (2) and (3) get posted, but (2) is flagged for a human to look at. The human censor queue is a few minutes long, thus the delay. There is no need for a human to look at everything.
I have no first hand knowledge that it works this way, but it seems to me that this is the way any non-moron would design it, rather than hiring 4000 humans to do what a small perl script could do.
Yeah you should have paid attention to the recall rate comment. Do you know what a false positive and true negative are? And how the rate could cause you to run afoul of the government?
Seems like a small number of new party employees when you have a population of 1.3 billion.
Morons think Google has 'algorithms' that do the clever stuff, but Google's success in the search-engine business is down to legions of Human operators who constantly create 'semantic hints' from daily mined data flowing from the search terms people are using. Modern computing is a VERY people intensive business. We are back to the times when office blocks were filled full of people with slide-rules and maths-tables, and later on mechanical and then electro-mechanical 'adding'-machines.
China is inventing nothing here. Indeed, its use of masses of people spying on Internet traffic lags behind the USA and EU by a significant degree. The only difference is that China is NOT a first-world 'democracy', so it still believes in the usefulness of crude censorship. Of course, China felt emboldened when Tony Blair instructed his LibCon puppets to imprison people for criticizing the UK's armed services online, especially if the critics were of a 'Muslim' background.
Given that many pro-authority morons read Slashdot, let me point out how Blair's actions are designed to cause a chain-reaction. Blair's people used the excuse of 'cyber bullying' to create a new law where 'offending' people with an electronic message was a criminal offense. Zionist owned TV stations and newspapers were excluded from the law, of course- even though they were responsible for promoting it in the first place with constant 'yellow' journalism.
-People were told 'cyber-bullying' was stalking and harassing a 'living ordinary person'.
-then it became showing disrespect for an ordinary person that had died (even though slandering the dead had never been a crime in the UK)
-then it became showing disrespect for 'fallen' soldiers, no matter what war-crimes they were involved with
-then it became ANY disrespect shown to the armed services in general (no right to anti-war protest)
-yesterday, in Ireland, a 26-year old man was arrested for referring to a politician whose surname was 'Rabbitte' as 'Rabbit', and not even as an insult. The Irish government STATED that writing insulting things about serving politicians is a crime when done electronically by ordinary citizens, and specifically referred to Blair's cyber-bullying laws as a justification.
We call this the 'slippery slope'. In the UK, intelligence agencies have been incensed by Blair's stupidity, and forced the government to back-track on the law. Why? Because the intelligence agencies REQUIRE people say what they think openly, so they can be tracked and cataloged. Britain hovers between the US system of free-speech, and the Chinese system of 'approved' speech- bouncing erratically between the two. The zionist news agencies (especially the BBC and those run by Rupert "Goebbels" Murdoch) love to run campaigns demanding the rights of ordinary citizens be severely curtailed in the name of 'political correctness'. Porn was illegal in the UK for the longest time precisely because of this.
In the UK, the tradition of 'free speech' was for the 'important' people, never the riff-raff from the streets. The age of the internet has thus proved very confusing for the powers-that-be. British newspapers have a tradition of employing some of the most vile racists and elitists on the planet, giving them daily opportunity to spew bile at Muslims, 'blacks' and ordinary working-class people. No change in the law can be allowed to prevent this. The trick Blair uses is based on old telecommunication laws that were drafted to deal with obscene phone calls. Electronic messages of ANY form from ordinary citizens are thus treated as phone calls for the sake of prosecution, neatly ensuring the same laws do not impede Blair's neo-nazi journalistic allies.
Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here. I am not a censor.