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Researchers Made a Fake Social Network To Infiltrate China's Internet Censors
Jason Koebler writes: In order to get inside China's notorious internet filter, Harvard researcher Gary King created his own fake social network to gain access to the programs used to censor content, so he could reverse-engineer the system. "From inside China, we created our own social media website, purchased a URL, rented server space, contracted with one of the most popular software platforms in China used to create these sites, submitted, automatically reviewed, posted, and censored our own submissions," King wrote in a study published in Science. "We had complete access to the software; we were even able to get their recommendations on how to conduct censorship on our own site in compliance with government standards."
They didn't "infiltrate" the censors, they just got the same standard access to tools and communication channels as any other random social network site in China. This tells us absolutely nothing that isn't already public information if you simply read Chinese posts by people who have used the system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
the Chinese government would see it and crack down even harder on net access
Um, how, exactly?
It's not like they're going to change their standards over this. What allowed this to happen is that the task of censorship is so time consuming and broad that the government had to outsource some of the work to the site runners.
(Government) censorship is always top-heavy, and always relies on a degree of volunteerism from the populace. The most this researcher did is made the government a bit more paranoid about the actions of foreign nationals.
Studying governments and cultures is an important branch of academia, and while it was ethically questionable, it's still entirely within the domain of critical examination.