Two journalists have been killed in Syria while reporting on the front line. French journalist Yves Debaywas shot twice while covering the conflict between the Syrian regime’s army and rebel forces on 17 January, reportedly killed by a regime sniper. Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Al-Massalma was shot with three bullets the following day during fights in the town of Busra Al-Harir in the southern province of Deraa. The Syrian journalist for Al Jazeera, who used the pseudonym Mohamed Al-Horani, was an activist in the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad before he joined the news network. More than 60,000 people have died since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011.
Lupe Fiasco – ejected at Obama’s reelection event
On 17 January, a Cameroonian man who text his friend saying “I’m very much in love with you” had a three year jail sentence upheld.Jean-Claude Roger Mbédé had already served a year and a half in prison for homosexual conduct when he was released on bail for medical reasons in July 2012 — he was malnourished and injured after being assaulted. Cameroon is considered the worst place in Africa for persecution of homosexuals. Last year, 14 people were arrested for homosexuality, 12 of whom were prosecuted.
On 19 January, a journalist in Somalia was killed whilst walking to work. Abdihared Osman Aden, a veteran producer for Shabelle Media Network was shot by unidentified assailants, becoming the fifth Shabelle worker to be murdered in 13 months. Twelve journalists were killed in Somalia in 2012, the highest rate of murders in Africa that year. All the deaths from last year remain unsolved, accoring to Committee to Protect Journalists’ research. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud had vowed to establish a task force to investigate the deaths of media workers in November, but has failed to take action so far, according to local journalists.
Google will decline personal information requests from authoritarian governments in Africa, it announced on 17 January. In a press conference in Nairobi, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Google are careful where they place servers and staff, as refusing frequent information requests from the government could lead to arrests and harassment.
Rapper Lupe Fiasco was removed from the stage during an event to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration. Headlining the StartUp RockOn concert, Fiasco took to the stage at The Hamilton in Washington, saying that he didn’t vote for Obama during a 30-minute anti-war performance. The performance ended with security eventually moving him along for the next performer, after the rapper refused to leave the stage. Co-founders of the festival Hypervocal later released a statement putting the removal of the star down to a “bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance”, as opposed to his opinions. Lupe Fiasco has previously voiced opposition to the Obama administration, when discussing the President ordering drone attacks.
Fabio Coelho was detained in September by order of a judge from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. He demanded the removal of YouTube videos considered offensive against Alcides Bernal, the mayoral candidate of state capital Campo Grande. Since the video wasn’t promptly deleted, Coelho was held responsible.
He was questioned by federal police and released shortly after.
Google Brazil executive Fabio Coelho. Image from Twitter
Brazilian law is extremely rigid about offensive material aimed at political candidates. But many view some of the judges’ attitudes in these cases as excessive and often times myopic.
In a statement issued in September, Coelho said the episode had “intimidating effects” on freedom of expression. He claimed the videos were “legitimate manifestations of freespeech” and should be kept available.
“There are gaps in Brazil’s electoral legislation that make this kind of situation possible”, said Google Brazil’s Public Policy Senior Counsel Marcel Leonardi about Coelho’s arrest. He added:
We hope this episode puts a light on the need to adjust Brazil’s law, so that legitimate political outcries from internet users can be differentiated from, say, unlawful propaganda. The dynamics of the internet need to be understood.
In November, lobbying by telecom companies in the Brazilian Congress’s lower house killed a draft bill known as the “internet bill of rights”, a civil rights framework to guarantee basic rights for internet users, content creators and online intermediaries.
Even rainstorms can be sensitive in China. The recent storm in Beijing which killed at least 77 people caused the censors to come out in force, with newspapers told to can coverage and online accounts of the deluge snipped.
But with 500 million internet users, the obvious question is, how does China do it? What are the mechanics of China’s internet censorship?
It makes things simpler if we divide the censorship first into two camps: censoring the web outside China and censoring domestic sites.
American journalist James Fallows very readable account of how China censors the outside web explains: “Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted.”
Briefly, this is what happens.
Censoring incoming web pages
The public security ministry is the main government body which oversees censorship of the outside Internet through its Golden Shield Project.
The key to their control is the fact that unlike many other countries, China is only connected to the outside internet through three links (or choke points as Fallows calls them) — one via Japan in the Beijing-Tianjin-Qingdao area, one also via Japan in Shanghai and one in Guangzhou via Hong Kong. At each one of these choke points there is something called a “tapper” which copies each website request and incoming web page and sends it to a surveillance computer for checking. This means that browsing non-local websites in China can sometimes be frustratingly slow.
There are four ways for a surveillance computer to block your request.
The DNS (Domain Name System) block: When you enter a web page, the DNS looks up the address of that page in computer language (the IP address). China has a list of IP addresses it blocks, if your web page is on that IP address, the DNS is instructed to give back a bad address and you will get a “site not found” error message.
Connection Reset: Another the way the government prevents you seeing one of its blacklisted sites is not to return a bad address but to constantly reset the request, which is slightly more insidious since this kind of error can occur naturally. If it happened outside China you could press reset and the chances are the next time you would be successful. But in China the reset is intentional and however many times you resend the request you will get a “The connection has reset.”
URL keyword block: To cast its net even wider, the tappers also check the web address. If it contains any banned words, say “Falun Gong” or “Dalai Lama” the request is sent into an infinite loop, you never reach the site and your connection times out.
Content filtering: In this technique the content of web pages is scanned for banned words, with the connection timing out if any blacklisted words are found. This could for example, allow you to browse the Guardian website, but not access some of the new stories.
Censorship technology is continuously becoming more sophisticated, and words and IP addresses go on and off the blacklists.
Index contacted Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and whose research has focused on Chinese internet censorship, to ask him if there had been much change to the above in the four years since Fallows’s article. Here’s what he said:
“It seems like filtering the content of the web pages using internet routers was not working well for the censors, and they even seemed to be devoting less resources to it over time as we did our experiments,” he told Index by email interview. “They still block IP addresses, DNS addresses, and do keyword filtering on GET requests [URL keyword block].”
Censoring domestic websites
Far more of a challenge to the Chinese government is keeping its homegrown internet in check. And this it does mostly by making sure the private companies that run most of the Chinese web self-censor by issuing threats, “vaguely-worded” laws and, in the case of emergency breaking stories, day-to-day directives.
Censoring professional content
Web companies self-censor in many different ways. Content which they produce themselves is “cleansed” first by the writer and then by editors if necessary. There are few specific censorship guidelines; it is more of an acquired habit of knowing where to draw the line based on fear of punishment. American scholar Perry Link wrote an eloquent essay back in 2003 — read it here — about how Chinese censorship is like an anaconda in the chandelier ready to pounce if someone oversteps that line:
The Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments–all quite ‘naturally.’
Censoring user-produced content
This is where it gets really interesting.
“Social media is more dynamic and fluid than traditional online content, so the censors have to be creative in how they control social media,” says Crandall.
Banned topics and sensitive terms are deleted by hand by armies (literally) of paid internet “police”. This, from a paper published here in June by a team of researchers at Harvard University:
The size and sophistication of the Chinese government’s program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history. Unlike in the US, where social media is centralized through a few providers, in China it is fractured across hundreds of local sites, with each individual site employing up to 1,000 censors. Additionally, approximately 20,000–50,000 Internet police and an estimated 250,000–300,000 “50 cent party members” (wumao dang) are employed by the central government.
More evidence for the lack of a hardcopy list of banned topics is that different online companies seem to censor different things.
Crandall adds:
One thing we’ve noticed in our research is that what various companies censor seems to vary widely from company to company, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious ‘master list’ of what companies are supposed to censor. They seem to make up their own lists based on what they think their liabilities would be if the government had to intervene.
For example, censoring in Tibet and Qinghai (a largely Tibetan province) is much stricter than in eastern parts of the country.
Latest trends
Recent reports on Chinese internet censorship have offered some surprising results. First, the Harvard paper referred to above analysed Chinese-language blogs and found that censors were targeting material that could have incited protests or others types of mass action, leaving material critical of the government uncensored.
A recent University of Hong Kong study on Weibo (China’s wildly popular version of Twitter) posts found that the list of words was changing constantly.
“What we are finding is a constantly morphing list of keywords, a cat-and-mouse contest between people and censors,” King-wa Fu, one of the study’s researchers, told the Economist last month.
There might be more to it than a simple catch-up. According to Crandall, censorship can be used as a sophisticated tool to control the news. In a paper titled Whiskey, Weed, and Wukan on the World Wide Web: On Measuring Censors’ Resources and Motivations, when a news story reflects badly on the government, posts on it are censored, but when that news story has been turned around to a good story, the word is unblocked.
“It appears that censorship was applied only long enough for the news about Wukan to change from sensitive news to a story of successful government intervention to reach a peaceful resolution to the problem,” the paper’s authors write.
(Wukan is the name of a village in southern China where huge clashes between the police and locals occurred over illegal land grabs late last year. The government eventually caved into the villagers’ demands and then turned the story in one of a provincial government victory.)
The Future
Chinese censorship has to move with the times, particularly now there are 500 million Chinese online, many of whom are ardent microbloggers.
Crandall believes that the government is looking into how to manipulate social media to influence the news.
I think what the future of internet censorship holds is more emphasis on control and less emphasis on blocking content. It’s very difficult to block some specific topic, but if you can slow down spread of news of the topic at some times and speed up spread of news about the topic at other times you can use that to your advantage to control how issues play out in the news cycles.
MORE ON THIS STORY:
Blogger Wen Yunchao wrote for Index on Censorship magazine in 2010 about the art of Chinese censorship. Read his article here.
Also writing for our magazine, Southern Weekend columnist Xiao Shu discusses the repressive and chaotic nature of China’s internet censorship here.
Read Chinese author and blogger Han Han’s essay about publishing and censorship in China here.
From journalists murdered for chasing stories of illegal mining to exploding packages delivered to newspaper offices, India battled with a range of free expression and censorship issues in 2012, a report released this week by media watchdog The Hoot shows.
Harassment in the form of stone-throwing, physical assault and even bullets was meted out to journalists exposing the underbelly of India, especially when reporting on cases of deep corruption by politicians.
The arts also saw censorship in the form of cancelled shows due to objections of themes such as homosexuality, and the much-publicised cancelled visit of Salman Rushdie to the Jaipur Literary Festival due to “security concerns”.
Section 66A of the IT Act 2000 also made headlines when ordinary citizens were arrested for criticising politicians on social media platforms, leading to massive public outrage.
