Resisting the Censorship Infrastructure in China

China’s censorship infrastructure is widely recognized as sophisticated, strict, and comprehensive. We conducted a qualitative study to understand Chinese citizens’ practices to navigate the censored Chinese Internet. We found that participants’ practices were closely related to their understanding of and resistance to the censorship infrastructure. Participants switched between public and private channels based on the information they desired to seek. They communicated in ways that were considered less vulnerable to censorship examination. They broadened their information search to mitigate the impact of censored content consumption. Through these practices, participants reportedly coped with the censorship infrastructure in an effective manner. We discuss how this case of resistance to censorship in China may further our understanding of such infrastructure

Systemization of Pluggable Transports for Censorship Resistance

An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the uncensored network is a frequent target of censorship due to the ease with which a nation-state censor can control it. A number of censorship resistance systems have been developed thus far to help circumvent blocking on this link, which we refer to as link circumvention systems (LCs). The variety and profusion of attack vectors available to a censor has led to an arms race, leading to a dramatic speed of evolution of LCs. Despite their inherent complexity and the breadth of work in this area, there is no systematic way to evaluate link circumvention systems and compare them against each other. In this paper, we (i) sketch an attack model to comprehensively explore a censor's capabilities, (ii) present an abstract model of a LC, a system that helps a censored client communicate with a server over the Internet while resisting censorship, (iii) describe an evaluation stack that underscores a layered approach to evaluate LCs, and (iv) systemize and evaluate existing censorship resistance systems that provide link circumvention. We highlight open challenges in the evaluation and development of LCs and discuss possible mitigations.Comment: Content from this paper was published in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Volume 2016, Issue 4 (July 2016) as "SoK: Making Sense of Censorship Resistance Systems" by Sheharbano Khattak, Tariq Elahi, Laurent Simon, Colleen M. Swanson, Steven J. Murdoch and Ian Goldberg (DOI 10.1515/popets-2016-0028

How We Express Ourselves Freely: Censorship, Self-censorship, and Anti-censorship on a Chinese Social Media

Censorship, anti-censorship, and self-censorship in an authoritarian regime have been extensively studies, yet the relationship between these intertwined factors is not well understood. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale survey study (N = 526) with Sina Weibo users toward bridging this research gap. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis, we uncover how users are being censored, how and why they conduct self-censorship on different topics and in different scenarios (i.e., post, repost, and comment), and their various anti-censorship strategies. We further identify the metrics of censorship and self-censorship, find the influence factors, and construct a mediation model to measure their relationship. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for democratic social media design and future censorship research.Comment: iConference 2023 has accepte

Introduction to Values, Power, and Politics in Digital Infrastructures Minitrack

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The Radical Practice of “Hanging Out”: China’s University Student Dissidents

This interdisciplinary paper advances existing empirical research on the longevity of anti-state university student protests in the People’s Republic of China. This paper contributes ethnographic data from Beijing and Fuzhou university students to yield a Marxian critique of Chinese authoritarianism. This paper asserts that empowering identity development and subversive scholarship, or the use of critical scholarship to transmit critical consciousness of political injustice, in Chinese universities creates more durable resistance against Chinese authoritarianism. This paper concludes that methodological and tactical shifts can similarly sustain American student protest

WeChat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms

In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformization and then to the infrastructuralization of its platform model. Moreover, our findings show that the infrastructuralization of the WeChat platform model in China is shaped by markedly techno-nationalist media regulations and an increasingly overt cyber-sovereignty agenda. Drawing on the results of the analysis of technical documentation, business reports, as well as observations and interviews, we first present WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure, and then we contextualize WeChat in the history of ICT infrastructure and the development of the internet in China. Finally, we analyze the specific role of the WeChat Pay service in establishing a new monetary transaction standard. We conclude by inquiring whether this emerging techno-nationalist model could be a plausible platform regulation in the future

Democratisation of Cinematic Space in Malaysia: Digital Film Activism and the Freedom Film Festival

Digital film activism as a popular alternative platform is used for the publication and dissemination of information, ideas, and views deemed too sensitive for the state controlled mainstream media. Such forms of activism have been actively carried out through the annual Freedom Film Festival (FFF). Held since 2003, the FFF exhibits films and documentaries with hopes of spreading justice, peace, equality, and democracy. The FFF exists not only as a site of exhibition and distribution that bypasses state legislation and censorship in delegitimising the oppressive forces of censorship and state control, it also encourages the production of such films that would either be prohibited or subjected to strict cinematic, cultural or political controls. This paper critically examines the development of digital film activism and the FFF along the theoretical formulation of Third Cinema to analyse if indeed cinematic space in Malaysia has begin to become democratise