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Terms related to political activists, anti-government movements and state censorship efforts are the most likely to be censored on Chinese blogs and social media sites, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

The "Chinese Firewall" is known to blocks certain websites - including parts of Google and Facebook - but the CMU study is one of the first to examine individual messages, words and terms that have been censored.

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An inside look at censorship in China

Researchers found that the names Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, two Chinese political protesters, as well as the term Linagui, which is a code term for planned protests, are blocked on Chinese websites and microblogs called weibos at high rates.

Researchers studied 57 million messages posted on Sina Weibo, which is a Chinese microblogging site akin to Facebook or Twitter with 200 million users. Researchers used the site's API to find terms that had been deleted.

During a two-day period in July, 93 of 114 messages on Sina Weibo containing the name of Tiananmen Square protester Jian Zemin, who was rumored to have died, were deleted. Researchers also found that politically sensitive terms, such as the name of Fang Binying, one of the reported architects of the Chinese Firewall, is likely to be blocked, as was a term meaning "to ask someone to resign," especially after a deadly high-speed rail crash last year.

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Even less innocuous terms were found to be censored, including words meaning iodized salt and radioactive iodine, which researchers found had high delete rates after the Japanese earthquake when there were some fears of salt contamination.

The study also found that some geographic areas had high levels of censorship compared to others. In Tibet, for example, which has been fighting for political freedom from the Chinese government, more than half of the posts originating from the area were deleted.

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Chinese Firewall's most blocked terms

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Byron Spice bspice@cs.cmu.edu 412-268-9068 Carnegie Mellon University

PITTSBURGHResearchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science analyzed millions of Chinese microblogs, or "weibos," to uncover a set of politically sensitive terms that draw the attention of Chinese censors. Individual messages containing the terms were often deleted at rates that could vary based on current events or geography.

The study is the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, a topic that drew attention and controversy earlier this year when Twitter announced a country-by-country policy for removing tweets that don't comply with local laws.

In China, where online censorship is highly developed, the researchers found that oft-censored terms included well-known hot buttons, such as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, and human rights activists Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo. Others varied based on events; Lianghui, a term that normally refers to a joint meeting of China's parliament and its political advisory body, became subject to censorship when it emerged as a code word for "planned protest" during pro-democracy unrest that began in February 2011.

The CMU study also showed high rates of weibo censorship in certain provinces. The phenomenon was particularly notable in Tibet, a hotbed of political unrest, where up to 53 percent of locally generated microblogs were deleted.

The study by Noah Smith, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI); David Bamman, a Ph.D. student in LTI; and Brendan O'Connor, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, appears in the March issue of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

"A lot of studies have focused on censorship that blocks access to Internet sites, but the practice of deleting individual messages is not yet well understood," Smith said. "The rise of domestic Chinese microblogging sites has provided a unique opportunity to systematically study content censorship in detail."

The so-called Great Firewall of China, which prevents Chinese residents from accessing foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, is China's best known censorship tool. Other countries also are known to block Web access, such as when Egypt shut down Twitter and other social media sites during last year's Arab Spring protests.

But blocking access to all sites and services is impossible if China or any other country is to harness the Web's commercial and educational potential, Bamman said. An alternative is to allow access to sites, but police the content, eliminating messages deemed objectionable. Automated methods may be used to eliminate some messages, while others are deleted manually, he noted. Seldom are all weibos with a sensitive term deleted, but anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that certain messages are targeted.

Originally posted here:
Carnegie Mellon performs first large-scale analysis of 'soft' censorship of social media in China

The study is the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, a topic that drew attention and controversy earlier this year when Twitter announced a country-by-country policy for removing tweets that don't comply with local laws.

In China, where online censorship is highly developed, the researchers found that oft-censored terms included well-known hot buttons, such as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, and human rights activists Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo. Others varied based on events; Lianghui, a term that normally refers to a joint meeting of China's parliament and its political advisory body, became subject to censorship when it emerged as a code word for "planned protest" during pro-democracy unrest that began in February 2011.

The CMU study also showed high rates of weibo censorship in certain provinces. The phenomenon was particularly notable in Tibet, a hotbed of political unrest, where up to 53 percent of locally generated microblogs were deleted.

The study by Noah Smith, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI); David Bamman, a Ph.D. student in LTI; and Brendan O'Connor, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, appears in the March issue of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

"A lot of studies have focused on censorship that blocks access to Internet sites, but the practice of deleting individual messages is not yet well understood," Smith said. "The rise of domestic Chinese microblogging sites has provided a unique opportunity to systematically study content censorship in detail."

The so-called Great Firewall of China, which prevents Chinese residents from accessing foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, is China's best known censorship tool. Other countries also are known to block Web access, such as when Egypt shut down Twitter and other social media sites during last year's Arab Spring protests.

But blocking access to all sites and services is impossible if China or any other country is to harness the Web's commercial and educational potential, Bamman said. An alternative is to allow access to sites, but police the content, eliminating messages deemed objectionable. Automated methods may be used to eliminate some messages, while others are deleted manually, he noted. Seldom are all weibos with a sensitive term deleted, but anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that certain messages are targeted.

"You even see some weibos where the writer asks, 'Is this going to be deleted?'" O'Connor said. In late 2010, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on a Chinese microblog site; within an hour of sending a message about Falun Gong, his account was shut down.

To study this "soft" censorship, the CMU team analyzed almost 57 million messages posted on Sina Weibo, a domestic Chinese microblog site similar to Twitter that has more than 200 million users. They collected samples of weibos from June 27 to Sept. 30, 2011, using an application programming interface (API) that Sina Weibo provides to developers so they can build related services.

Using the same API, they later checked a random subset of weibos to see if they still existed and another subset that included terms known to be politically sensitive. If a weibo was deleted, Sina would return what the researchers came to regard as an ominous message: "target weibo does not exist."

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First large-scale analysis of 'soft' censorship of social media in China

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jan Zverina jzverina@sdsc.edu 858-534-5111 University of California - San Diego

On a January evening in 2011, Egypt with a population of 80 million, including 23 million Internet users vanished from cyberspace after its government ordered an Internet blackout amidst anti-government protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The following month, the Libyan government, also under siege, imposed an Internet "curfew" before completely cutting off access for almost four days.

To help explain exactly how these governments disrupted the Internet, a team of scientists led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego conducted an analysis based largely on the drop in a specific subset of observable Internet traffic that is a residual product of malware. Many types of malicious software or network activity generate unsolicited traffic in attempting to compromise or infect vulnerable machines. This traffic "pollution" is commonly referred to as Internet background radiation (IBR) and is ubiquitously observable on most publicly accessible Internet links.

The analysis marks the first time that this malware-generated traffic pollution was used to analyze Internet censorship and/or network outages, and the researchers believe this novel methodology could be adopted on a wider scale to create an automated early warning system to help detect such Internet reachability problems in the future.

"We actually used something that's generally regarded as bad traffic pollution due to malware for a beneficial purpose, specifically to improve our understanding of geopolitical censorship behavior," said K.C. Claffy, CAIDA's founder and principal investigator for the research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Added Emile Aben, part of the research team and a system architect with the Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), an independent organization based in The Netherlands that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination: "We believe that research such as this has security relevance and implications for every nation in the world."

Specifically, the research team including scientists in Italy and The Netherlands used UC San Diego's Network Telescope, which consists of a globally routed segment of Internet address space that carries almost no legitimate Internet traffic. Also known as a 'darknet' because this subset of addresses does not have any devices assigned to them, the UC San Diego network telescope collects what could be considered "garbage" of the Internet, such as traffic due to mistyped IP (Internet protocol) addresses, malicious scanning of address space by hackers looking for vulnerable targets, backscatter from random source DoS (denial of service) attacks, and the automated spread of malicious software, including botnet and worm activity. The team also used other multiple sources of large-scale data available to the academic community, such as global routing signaling information.

"Using a combination of this data allowed us to narrow down which forms of Internet access disruption were implemented in a given region over time, but the malware-induced traffic helped us uncover things that the other data did not reveal," said Alberto Dainotti, who recently joined CAIDA from the University of Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy, and served as lead author of the study, called Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship. "Among other insights, we detected what we believe were the Gaddafi government's attempts to test a firewall to conduct higher precision host-based blocking while they were executing the coarser approach of router-based disconnection."

"On a larger scale, we were able to analyze how regimes go about bringing down an entire country's Internet infrastructure," said Aben.

Here is the original post:
Internet censorship revealed through the haze of malware pollution

Published: March. 7, 2012 at 8:53 PM

PITTSBURGH, March 7 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say they've analyzed "soft" censorship of social media in China, identifying politically sensitive terms Chinese censors may notice.

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science analyzed millions of Chinese microblogs, or "weibos" and found individual messages containing such terms were often deleted at rates that could vary based on current events or geography.

The study is the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, a controversy highlighted by Twitter's announcement earlier this year of a country-by-country policy for removing tweets that don't comply with local laws.

In China the researchers found that oft-censored terms included well-known hot buttons such as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, and human rights activists such as Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo.

The study also found high rates of weibo censorship in certain provinces, notably Tibet, a hotbed of political unrest.

In Tibet up to 53 percent of locally generated microblogs were deleted by authorities, it found.

"A lot of studies have focused on censorship that blocks access to Internet sites, but the practice of deleting individual messages is not yet well understood," researcher Noah Smith said in a university release. "The rise of domestic Chinese microblogging sites has provided a unique opportunity to systematically study content censorship in detail."

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China's 'soft' blog censorship studied