Every Rose Has Its Thorn: Censorship and Surveillance on Social Video Platforms in China

Social media companies operating in China face a complex array of regulations and are liable for content posted to their platforms. Through reverse engineering we provide a view into how keyword censorship operates on four popular social video platforms in China: YY, 9158, Sina Show, and GuaGua. We also find keyword surveillance capabilities on YY. Our findings show inconsistencies in the implementation of censorship and the keyword lists used to trigger censorship events between the platforms we analyzed. We reveal a range of targeted content including criticism of the government and collective action. These results develop a deeper understanding of Chinese social media via comparative analysis across platforms, and provide evidence that there is no monolithic set of rules that govern how information controls are implemented in China.

[1]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Detecting Forged TCP Reset Packets , 2009, NDSS.

[2]  Benjamin Edelman,et al.  Internet Filtering in China , 2003, IEEE Internet Comput..

[3]  Towards a Comprehensive Picture of the Great Firewall's DNS Censorship , 2014, FOCI.

[4]  Jeffrey Knockel,et al.  Three Researchers, Five Conjectures: An Empirical Analysis of TOM-Skype Censorship and Surveillance , 2011, FOCI.

[5]  Michael Chau,et al.  Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy , 2013, IEEE Internet Computing.

[6]  Nart Villeneuve Search Monitor Project : Toward a Measure of Transparency , 2008 .

[7]  Jedidiah R. Crandall,et al.  Empirical Study of a National-Scale Distributed Intrusion Detection System: Backbone-Level Filtering of HTML Responses in China , 2010, 2010 IEEE 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[8]  Dan S. Wallach,et al.  The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions , 2013, USENIX Security Symposium.

[9]  Margaret E. Roberts,et al.  How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression , 2013, American Political Science Review.

[10]  Rebecca MacKinnon,et al.  China's Censorship 2.0: How Companies Censor Bloggers , 2009, First Monday.

[11]  Margaret E. Roberts,et al.  Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation , 2014, Science.

[12]  Brendan T. O'Connor,et al.  Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media , 2012, First Monday.

[13]  Robert N. M. Watson,et al.  Ignoring the Great Firewall of China , 2006, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[14]  N. Villeneuve Breaching trust : an analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform , 2008 .

[15]  Stefan Lindskog,et al.  How the Great Firewall of China is Blocking Tor , 2012, FOCI.

[16]  Jeffrey Knockel,et al.  Chat program censorship and surveillance in China: Tracking TOM-Skype and Sina UC , 2013, First Monday.

[17]  Philipp Winter,et al.  Analyzing the Great Firewall of China Over Space and Time , 2015, Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol..

[18]  Jedidiah R. Crandall,et al.  ConceptDoppler: a weather tracker for internet censorship , 2007, CCS '07.