How Chinese state blocks foreign TV broadcasts

Ray

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How Chinese state blocks foreign TV broadcasts

Access to the BBC's English-language website has been blocked across China, the corporation has said.

BBC Global News director Peter Horrocks said it appeared to be "deliberate censorship", adding that the BBC was complaining to the authorities.

Other major news websites were functioning as usual, and the reason for the blackout remained unclear.

Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the BBC's English-language site has been generally available.

However, other BBC services including its Chinese-language news website has been blocked largely since it was launched.

BBC World TV - as with all overseas broadcasters - suffers intermittent blackouts particularly when reporting China stories.

Mr Horrocks said: "The BBC provides impartial, trusted news to millions of people around the world, and attempts to censor our news services show just how important it is to get our accurate information to them."

The last time the BBC's English-language website was disrupted was during the corporation's coverage of activist Chen Guangcheng's escape from house arrest in April 2012.

BBC News - BBC's website is being blocked across China
Also watch the video in this link where the BBC's Celia Hatton demonstrates Chinese censorship of BBC World TV.

The Chinese posters claim that they have free access to world news and views, but this clearly indicates the falsehood they spew.

This is the reason why the Chinese people do not understand that democratic countries can actually see all types of programmes and read news without any restrictions.

The Chinese people live a fishbowl existence and think that all others live in such a constricted and suffocating way as they do.
 

Ray

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China employs two million microblog monitors state media say

More than two million people in China are employed by the government to monitor web activity, state media say, providing a rare glimpse into how the state tries to control the internet.

The Beijing News says the monitors, described as internet opinion analysts, are on state and commercial payrolls.

China's hundreds of millions of web users increasingly use microblogs to criticise the state or vent anger.

Recent research suggested Chinese censors actively target social media.

The report by the Beijing News said that these monitors were not required to delete postings.

They are "strictly to gather and analyse public opinions on microblog sites and compile reports for decision-makers", it said. It also added details about how some of these monitors work.

Tang Xiaotao has been working as a monitor for less than six months, the report says, without revealing where he works.

"He sits in front of a PC every day, and opening up an application, he types in key words which are specified by clients.

"He then monitors negative opinions related to the clients, and gathers (them) and compile reports and send them to the clients," it says.

The reports says the software used in the office is even more advanced and supported by thousands of servers. It also monitors websites outside China.

China rarely reveals any details concerning the scale and sophistication of its internet police force.

It is believed that the two million internet monitors are part of a huge army which the government relies on to control the internet.

The government is also to organise training classes for them for the first time from 14 to 18 October, the paper says.

But it is not clear whether the training will be for existing monitors or for new recruits.

The training will have eight modules, and teach participants how to analyse and judge online postings and deal with crisis situations, it says.

The most popular microblogging site Sina Weibo, launched in 2010, now has more than 500 million registered users with 100 million messages posted daily.

Topics cover a wide range - from personal hobbies, health to celebrity gossip and food safety but they talso include politically sensitive issues like official corruption.

Postings deemed to be politically incorrect are routinely deleted.
BBC News - China employs two million microblog monitors state media say
This is a clear indication that the Chinese are living with only State sponsored views and their minds are monitored and conditioned as per the Communist Govt's diktat.

Even their own State media has stated that there are two million monitors at work.

Note also the way the Sate pretends that it is only for analysis!

Typical Chinese DoubleThink and DoubleSpeak.

What an opaque world the Chinese people live in and the Chinese posters vehemently protest that they are living in 'freedom'!
 

Ray

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The astonishing speed of Chinese censorship

You have written something politically sensitive on one of China's "weibo" microblogging sites. So how much time passes before it gets deleted? And what does it reveal about how Chinese censors work? Computer scientists Jed Crandall and Dan Wallach explain the findings of a study they conducted.

In China, internet penetration has grown massively in the last decade - from 4.6% in 2002 to 42.1% in 2012.

Microblogging site Sina Weibo only launched in 2010, but it now has 300 million users and about 100 million messages are sent daily. It clearly plays an important role in the discourse surrounding current events in China.

The Chinese government seems to require Chinese companies to maintain internal censorship regimes.

There have been several interesting studies on how Chinese censorship works and how to work around it, but we wanted to know how the censors do it and how they make their censorship scale to manage hundreds of millions of users.

We found a landscape in which a post could be deleted as quickly as five minutes after being put online and where the censors appear not to work a regular day, but seem to take a break when China's all-important 19:00 news comes on.

So how did we make such observations?

Speedy censor
Last year - along with several colleagues - we spent 30 days observing 3,500 users on Sina Weibo to track the fate of their posts. During this time around 300 of the accounts were deleted - that's about 12% of the total. We further examined data about the posts and that provided some fascinating insights into how the censors go about their job.

We looked at users who have been censored and then see how long their to-be-censored posts survived. Those who are more often censored are also censored faster which shows they are getting more scrutiny than other users.

We could do this because many Sina Weibo posts are only censored post-publication and so we could track the posts. We also identified users who were likely to make postings on sensitive topics and therefore also likely to be deleted.

We believe this is the first real-time analysis of weibo posts - that monitors how quickly microblog posts are removed in terms of minutes rather than days. What it revealed was a sophisticated operation.

We cannot estimate the exact number of staff who are dedicated to censorship, but it is clear that there are some relatively sophisticated programmers who build their censorship tooling and they have a number of staff who use those tools.

Deletions happen most heavily in the first hour after a post has been submitted. About 5% of deletions happened in the first eight minutes, and within 30 minutes almost 30% of the deletions had been made. Nearly 90% of deletions happen within the first 24 hours.

We worked out that if none of the process was automated, Sina Weibo would need to employ more than 4,000 censors reading at speed every day just to keep up.

There are other possible systems at work too:

There appears to be a keyword alert that highlights posts which should be considered for deletion (this is separate from the keyword filter that prevents some posts from appearing altogether)
Sina Weibo targets specific users who frequently post sensitive material
When a sensitive post is found a moderator will automatically delete all reposts
Sina Weibo can remove other posts containing a specific word retroactively using a keyword search when keywords are discovered in sensitive posts
Censors work independently and not in a regular work pattern (there appears to be a dip in activity when the 19:00 news is on)
Particular topics are targeted for deletion depending on how sensitive they are
The authorities are also likely to be targeting users who have had posts deleted in the past. These users' posts are deleted most quickly.

There are other censorship mechanisms, too. Sometimes Sina Weibo suspends posts until they can be manually checked, telling the user that the delay is because of "server data synchronisation".

It also uses "camouflaged posts", making it appear to a user that their post was successfully posted, but other users are not able to see the post and the poster is not aware of this.

Censors also track backwards to delete sensitive topics everywhere they arise, and monitor specific users.

What is censored?

We also found that those topics where a mass removal happens the fastest are those that combine events that are hot topics across Sina Weibo, for example the Beijing rainstorms or a specific sex scandal that occurred during our tracking effort, with topics that are generally considered sensitive.

If Sina Weibo had insufficient controls, the government may take action against the company. If their controls were too rigid, users might abandon them for one of their competitors.

Its success implies that it has found a happy medium, and that is what makes it an interesting social media platform to study.

But there is more research to do. We would like to get deeper into why some topics are censored and others not. We are also interested in the impact of the censorship. How much do the post deletions and other forms of censorship actually stymie conversation and free assembly? That is still an open question, and a very important one.
BBC News - The astonishing speed of Chinese censorship
Reminds me of George Orwell's book '1984'

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!

 

Ray

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Beijing orders new controls on 'Weibo' microblogs

Authorities in Beijing have issued new rules requiring users of microblog sites to register personal details.

BBC News - Beijing orders new controls on 'Weibo' microblogs

*********************

No wonder the Hong Kong people are contesting the Chinese Communist Mainlanders and their Govt fearing that the democracy and freedom that they have will be seriously curtailed and Big Brother will be Watching You all the time.

And no wonder the Chinese Communist Govt are keen to ensure that the Hong Kong people do not have freedom.

And the Communist Mainlanders want the freedom in Hong Kong to end so that the Hong Kong people suffer the same way as they do - a Dog in the Manger attitude so to say.
 
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