ron salaj's List: censorship

• The research paper notes that Chinese Web policing is mainly carried out via two different methods: censorship and review. The former is a publish-first-censor-later process, while the latter involves a more careful (and less free) review-first-maybe-publish-later process.
• two different methods: censorship and review. The former is a publish-first-censor-later process, while the latter involves a more careful (and less free) review-first-maybe-publish-later process.
• They note that it is likely because the government is (perhaps intentionally) promoting innovation and competition in the technologies of censorship,

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• It is possible too that some of the posts may have been deleted by Sina Weibo’s “rumor control” team — which aims to dispel false news and information, though in some cases, its hand appears to be forced by the government.

• The Chinese government, according to Reuters, has received support from ten of the country’s top technology firms — including e-commerce firm Alibaba, search giant Baidu, and dominant microblogging platform owner Sina — as it looks to introduce new censorship measures to “stop the spread of harmful information” over the Internet.

• publishing of fake comments and reviews online, known as astroturfing

• Another way the social media site Sina Weibo censors its site—alongside manual deletions by human censors of sensitive content and other steps—is by blocking the user from searching for specific keywords, and instead returning a message that says no results can be displayed.
• Below are seventy-one keywords (along with brief translations and notes by researchers here at Citizen Lab) that are currently blocked from searching on Sina Weibo.

• The monitors, who scour online comments and compile reports for officials or private businesses, outnumber even China’s 1.5 million active military personnel.
• The People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party, is holding a four-day seminar this month where successful students can be certified as “public opinion analysts,” according to a Beijing Times report. Once certified, they’re eligible for jobs with China’s propaganda department, commercial companies, news websites or public relation firms.

• "It does not matter how big or sensitive the story is, we can make it   disappear," promised a manager at Yage Times, China's   largest and most notorious "black" public relations (PR) firm.
• "We recently helped the head of a police bureau in Jieyang, Guangdong,   delete a set of stories from the web, but I cannot tell you exactly who it   was," said a representative of one black PR firm that sells its   services on Taobao, an online marketplace, under the title Geshigoufang.

• Two months ago the Russian government activated a new weapon in its war on Internet freedom — a broadly framed anti-piracy law [Global Voices report] that makes it extremely easy to shut down any online resource on claims of copyright infringement.

• And every day, teams of censors comb through the posts in search of anything that challenges what the government likes to call a “harmonious society.”
• We’ve created an interactive feature [2], launching today, that allows readers to see and understand the images that censors considered too sensitive for Chinese eyes.