Censorship and manipulation of online interactions in China and the West Week 8

HE NAN

Yao Chen (姚晨), a Chinese actress, is the most popular microblogger in China, with more than 75 million followers. So this Weibo social media, gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together.

If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents the wild man and ghost from the north.

Same was true in China, there was a great wall in the north, Chang Cheng, which protected China from invaders for 2000 years. Today, China also has a great firewall, the biggest digital boundary in the world.

A firewall is a security system that controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on applied rule set. A firewall establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another network (e.g., the Internet) that is assumed not to be secure and trusted.

The Golden Shield Project (Chinese：金盾工程), colloquially referred to as the Great Firewall of China is a censorship and surveillance project operated by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) division of the government of China. The project was initiated in 1998 and began operations in November 2003. The political and ideological background of the Golden Shield Project is considered to be one of Deng Xiaoping’s favorite sayings in the early 1980s: "If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in."

Websites blocked in China IP blocking DNS filtering and Redirection URL filtering Packet filtering Connection reset SSL man-in-the-middle attack Active IP probing VPN/SSH traffic recognition Gmail Google ( Maps, Docs, Drive, Encrypted, APIs) Picasa Facebook Youtube Twitter Blogspot WorldPress Archive DuckDuckGo Flickr BBC … Blocking methods Websites blocked in China

Censored content Web sites belonging to "outlawed" or suppressed groups, such as pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong News sources that often cover topics that are considered defamatory against China, such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and Marxist sites. These sites include Voice of  and the Chinese edition of BBC News. Sites related to the Taiwanese government, media, or other organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, and most large Taiwanese community websites or blogs. Web sites that contain anything the Chinese authorities regard as obscenity or pornography Web sites relating to criminal activity Sites linked with the Dalai Lama, his teachings or the International Tibet Independence Movement Most blogging sites experience frequent or permanent outages Web sites deemed as subversive

In China, we have billions of Internet users In China, we have billions of Internet users. So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, for Great Firewall, which keeps out “undesirable” foreign websites such as Facebook, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming.

On the one hand, China government want to satisfy people's need of a social network, for people really love social networking. But on the other hand, they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data any time they want. That's also the reason Google was pulled out from China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server.  

China's Internet firewall censors Hong Kong protest news China and Hong Kong on Instagram Instagram has been blocked in China since 28th September. The left picture shows Instagram in China with a message stating that the feed cannot be refreshed. The right side shows an Instagram search page in Hong Kong, which shows overtly political images related to the protests.

Weibo in China and Twitter in Hong Kong China's microblogging site, Sina Weibo does not allow for the search of the term "Hong Kong student." The Weibo results shown below are not related to the Hong Kong protest or students' movement. The right picture shows the results on Twitter for the same search term, "Hong Kong student."

Baidu in China and Google in Hong Kong Pictured left, is Baidu, China's biggest search engine. A search for the term "Occupy Central" brings blocked results and headlines with a pro-China slant. One of the headlines reads: "Occupy Central is destructive to the rule of law, social peace and stability." In comparison, searching for the same term on Google in Hong Kong, shows news of the Occupy Central demonstrations.

A case study: Google.cn in China Chang Lu

China Netizens-power is aggregating

GOOGLE.CN

Two categories of Chinese Internet censorship 1.“Outside the great firewall” Filtering of websites outside of China

Two categories of Chinese Internet censorship 2. “Inside the great firewall” Deletion of content on domestic commercial websites Takedown of domestically hosted websites Shut down of data centers

Government VS. Google.CN Because the local law, Google.cn faced a lot of blocking actions by the Chinese government since its entry in 2000 with Google.com From 2005, Google had its own server in China and decided to censor the research results by itself. www.google.cn Local law requiring to share user information Many game changer products not launched. ( YouTube, G+) Chinese government political censorship and surveillance

Scaring Facebook

What Facebook tells us ‘Private’ spaces Users can choose adverts THIS IS NOT THE WHOLE STORY

The truth Tracking users’ browsing history Identify users’ interests better Identifying songs and films playing nearby Nudging users to write about them

Shift in Facebook’s business model Sharing Clicking

The true dangers exposed to positive posts feel happier and write more positive posts more clicks more advertising revenue Facebook hides negative for business

Happiness experiment

They do not yet have the power to make us happy or sad but they will readily make us happier or sadder if it helps their earnings.

Emotional contagion through social networks

Structure 1. Concept explanation When emotional contagion connects to social networks: Previous experiments on Facebook Another experiment on Facebook Method Result

1. What is “emotional contagion” Emotional contagion is the tendency for two individuals to emotionally converge. One view developed by Elaine Hatfield is that emotional contagion can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person.

2. When it connects to social networks, like Facebook

Previous experiments of emotional contagion on Facebook Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, producing an “alone together” social comparison effect failed to address whether nonverbal are necessary for contagion to occur, or if verbal alone is enough

Another experiment of emotional contagion on Facebook: Whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions

Method People (N = 689,003, randomly) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed Two parallel experiments: Positive emotion & Negative emotion If they contained at least one positive or negative word 1 week (January 11–18, 2012)

Result Emotions spread via contagion through social networks (support previous studies) people’s emotional expressions on Facebook predict friends’ emotional expressions, even days later viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively. In fact, this is the result when people are exposed to less positive content, rather than more To date, there is no experimental evidence that emotions or moods are contagious in the absence of direct interaction between experiencer and target

Thank You

Reference ANTI, M. (2012). Behind the Great Firewall of China. TED-Talk from http://www. youtube. com/watch. Norris, Pippa; World Bank Staff (2009). Public Sentinel: News Media and Governance Reform. World Bank Publications. p. 360. ISBN 978-0-8213-8200-4. Retrieved 11 January 2011.    "How China’s Internet Police Control Speech on the Internet". Radio Free Asia. Retrieved 11 June 2013. "China’s police authorities spent the three years between 2003 and 2006 completing the massive “Golden Shield Project.” Not only did over 50 percent of China’s policing agencies get on the Internet, there is also an agency called the Public Information Network Security and Monitoring Bureau, which boasts a huge number of technologically advanced and well-equipped network police. These are all the direct products of the Golden Shield Project." "Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China". Cyber.law.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2011-06-13.