Corporate control? Measuring private sector censorship of social media : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Science in Information Technology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Censoring activities on sensitive topics have played a significant role on social network sites (SNSs). Owing to the difference in politics, economics and cultures in the various countries, many social network sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit and Imgur might implement different censorship standards according to the situation of the country. This study aims to explore whether governments’ decision and censorship policies mentioned in previous studies have been implemented on main social network sites. Additionally, this article searches a list of sensitive keywords on each tested site, which is also the simplest approach applied to explore censorship on social networ k sites regulated using keywords filtering. Indeed, classifying a list of keywords into blacklist or merely blocking some defined sensitive topics refers to the primary method for censoring information on social network sites. The discussion makes us re-examine not only censorship on social network sites but also propose three possible conclusions concerning censorship on social network sites in specific country, such as ‘censorship is weaker than we anticipated’, ‘some social network sites focus on supporting country’s censorship’ and ‘censorship is imperfect to be implemented by social network sites’. As shown by results, some leaks still exist on current censorship of social network sites, while some sites fail to sensor harmful information that should be blocked. However, some harmless information is blocked by certain sites that may influence users’ browse information. By analyzing the censorship data of blocked keywords and pornography sites on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit and Imgur, this research highlights the defect of censorship implemented on social network sites. Keywords: censorship standards, social network sites, censorin

On Modeling the Costs of Censorship

We argue that the evaluation of censorship evasion tools should depend upon economic models of censorship. We illustrate our position with a simple model of the costs of censorship. We show how this model makes suggestions for how to evade censorship. In particular, from it, we develop evaluation criteria. We examine how our criteria compare to the traditional methods of evaluation employed in prior works

Internet Censorship: An Integrative Review of Technologies Employed to Limit Access to the Internet, Monitor User Actions, and their Effects on Culture

The following conducts an integrative review of the current state of Internet Censorship in China, Iran, and Russia, highlights common circumvention technologies (CTs), and analyzes the effects Internet Censorship has on cultures. The author spends a large majority of the paper delineating China’s Internet infrastructure and prevalent Internet Censorship Technologies/Techniques (ICTs), paying particular attention to how the ICTs function at a technical level. The author further analyzes the state of Internet Censorship in both Iran and Russia from a broader perspective to give a better understanding of Internet Censorship around the globe. The author also highlights specific CTs, explaining how they function at a technical level. Findings indicate that among all three nation-states, state control of Internet Service Providers is the backbone of Internet Censorship. Specifically, within China, it is discovered that the infrastructure functions as an Intranet, thereby creating a closed system. Further, BGP Hijacking, DNS Poisoning, and TCP RST attacks are analyzed to understand their use-case within China. It is found that Iran functions much like a weaker version of China in regards to ICTs, with the state seemingly using the ICT of Bandwidth Throttling rather consistently. Russia’s approach to Internet censorship, in stark contrast to Iran and China, is found to rely mostly on the legislative system and fear to implement censorship, though their technical level of ICT implementation grows daily. TOR, VPNs, and Proxy Servers are all analyzed and found to be robust CTs. Drawing primarily from the examples given throughout the paper, the author highlights the various effects of Internet Censorship on culture – noting that at its core, Internet Censorship destroys democracy

A Churn for the Better: Localizing Censorship using Network-level Path Churn and Network Tomography

Recent years have seen the Internet become a key vehicle for citizens around the globe to express political opinions and organize protests. This fact has not gone unnoticed, with countries around the world repurposing network management tools (e.g., URL filtering products) and protocols (e.g., BGP, DNS) for censorship. However, repurposing these products can have unintended international impact, which we refer to as "censorship leakage". While there have been anecdotal reports of censorship leakage, there has yet to be a systematic study of censorship leakage at a global scale. In this paper, we combine a global censorship measurement platform (ICLab) with a general-purpose technique -- boolean network tomography -- to identify which AS on a network path is performing censorship. At a high-level, our approach exploits BGP churn to narrow down the set of potential censoring ASes by over 95%. We exactly identify 65 censoring ASes and find that the anomalies introduced by 24 of the 65 censoring ASes have an impact on users located in regions outside the jurisdiction of the censoring AS, resulting in the leaking of regional censorship policies

Toward automatic censorship detection in microblogs

Social media is an area where users often experience censorship through a variety of means such as the restriction of search terms or active and retroactive deletion of messages. In this paper we examine the feasibility of automatically detecting censorship of microblogs. We use a network growing model to simulate discussion over a microblog follow network and compare two censorship strategies to simulate varying levels of message deletion. Using topological features extracted from the resulting graphs, a classifier is trained to detect whether or not a given communication graph has been censored. The results show that censorship detection is feasible under empirically measured levels of message deletion. The proposed framework can enable automated censorship measurement and tracking, which, when combined with aggregated citizen reports of censorship, can allow users to make informed decisions about online communication habits.Comment: 13 pages. Updated with example cascades figure and typo fixes. To appear at the International Workshop on Data Mining in Social Networks (PAKDD-SocNet) 201

What can we learn from the history of film censorship? Public lecture

Today’s media and communications seem at odds with the idea of censorship. In a digital environment, media appear to be hardly controllable, due to their technological and spatial dimensions, opening new possibilities for a public sphere where freedom of choice and action are relocated into the hands of the user or consumer. Forms of external, top-down, corporate and/or state censorship seem to be replaced by forms of voluntary user-centered control. However, in this so-called post-disciplinary society, there is a renewed interest in traditional models of censorship. Moreover, as this talk on recent studies on film censorship will argue, we can learn a lot from why, where and how censorship emerged and operated