Our story last Friday about new Sina Weibo censorship tactics has attracted a lot of attention. In this story we ask the harder questions: Why would Sina start testing new censorship tactics at this time and what prompted this action?

Advantages

In summary, Sina's new censorship controls will:

  • mitigate user criticism of Sina's censorship policy
  • block information without exposing the importance attached to the information by the authorities through the mere act of censorship
  • block information in a way where users will likely not actively try to get around the block because they won't know it exists
  • create an image of Sina Weibo (and perhaps the Chinese Internet) as an open and welcoming forum with little censorship and bucketfuls of freedom of speech

Zhu Ling

It looks like the authorities finally learned their lesson after blocking information about the Thallium poisoning case of Zhu Ling. The censorship of this case is extremely interesting as the original incident took place in 1994. It aroused interest again after news about a recent poisoning incident at Fudan University. Strangely, authorities began to delete news articles posted on major Chinese media and blocked searches on Weibo and Google. This act of censorship actually creating more outcry than the case itself. Many Weibo users believed that the authorities were covering up discussion about the issue to protect the suspect, who comes from a family that has held senior posts in the government. After all, why would the authorities censor discussion about a 1990s murder case?

Many influential users began to post screenshots of the censorship messages they received when they searched for 朱令 (Zhu Ling). These same users also publicly asked which laws, regulations and policies they were violating. “作业本”, who has 6 million followers, was one of the more prominent Weibo users to post this question. He was temporarily muted after repeatedly posting on the case despite the constant deletion of his Weibo messages. Many of his messages contained the screenshot of the censorship notice.

Similar screenshots of censorship notices were also posted on the Weibo accounts of major media outlets such as 财经网, 网易新闻客户端, IBTimes中文网 and even on one of Sina’s own accounts (微博搜索).

While screenshots were being disseminated, other Weibo users started using the homophone “朱玲” and pinyin “Zhu Ling” to search and post about the case. Both keywords made it onto the list of top ten searches and therefore were automatically shown on the front page of Weibo search. It is highly likely that the person or people who were managing the censorship that evening at Sina Weibo made a conscious decision to only follow direct rules and instructions and chose to deliberately leave such homophones uncensored.

The authorities might have also by this point realized that by blocking the keyword 朱令 (Zhu Ling), they were piquing user interest in the story which in turn was being fuelled by Weibo influencers who would not let the censorship issue drop. Sina could not risk blocking the accounts of too many famous people all at once without risking losing users, businesses and advertising revenue. Sina officials likely judged this event to be a relatively low level incident and chose only to follow the directions from the propaganda department rather than any censorship initiatives on their own - even though they knew very well that the discussion about 朱令 (Zhu Ling) had now turned to a discussion about censorship. For all of the misgivings we have about Sina, they played the game well in this instance. It is a shame that we will likely never know if they received a slap on the wrists from higher authorities.

The 朱令 (Zhu Ling) case kept manifesting itself, however, as long as the keyword remained blocked. Domestic and foreign media continued to publish articles and Weibo about the incident despite the fact that this information was being censored as soon as the authorities could get to it. A White House petition to deport the primary suspect in the case even garnered over 100,000 signatures.

Ultimately this led Sina to stop censoring the keyword 朱令 (Zhu Ling). One day later, 朱令 (Zhu Ling) and related search terms dropped off of the list of popular search terms and the public turned their attention to other issues.

Given the background on the Zhu Ling case and our story on Friday, what would have happened had Sina used subtle censorship in the first place? We likely never would have suspected that the authorities might be covering up for the victim.

2013 Southern Weekly incident

The 2013 Southern Weekly incident was a conflict between the Propaganda Department of Guangdong Province and Southern Weekly (also known as Southern Weekend) over press freedom. The newspaper's original New Year's special editorial was changed significantly under pressure from propaganda officers. As with the Zhu Ling case, this incident was initially judged by authorities to be relatively low-level.

However, since the victim in this case was also from the fifth estate, many media outlets on Weibo posted about the incident, including Sina’s own top news accounts (@头条新闻, @新浪传媒). The incident escalated when Southern Weekly's official Weibo account was taken over by the authorities and Sina (was forced to) censor Southern Weekly related keywords/characters, including the individual characters for "southern", "weekly", “南” (south), "方” (-ern), “周” (week) and “末” (end). Such characters are commonly used in Chinese, as they are in English. Many users pointed out the absurdity of such broad strong censorship and posted screenshots of censored keywords.

Because Sina weibo censorship only looks for a partial match, keywords such as “北方” (northern) and “周杰伦” (Jay Chou) also triggered a censorship notice and returned no results. “周杰伦” (Jay Chou) made it into the top ten searched keywords because of the collateral damage he suffered from this incident. Also, because keywords are explicitly blocked, users tried acronyms and homophones to actively bypass censorship, such as “NFZM” and “南方Z末”. “南方Z末” was officially adopted by NetEase in its special report about this incident. The report, however, was deleted within hours.

Even staff who work for Sina Weibo said that the censorship orders even met resistance from Sina.

Tricking foreign media

Sina had already tricked Reuters into publishing a “Censors relax grasp on internet” headline by changing from an explicit complete block of “习近平” (Xi Jinping) to a delayed block. The next time a Chinese ambassador states that “[On Chinese internet ], you can get all kinds of opinions. It's much open”, it will be much harder to find evidence to dispute the claim.

A major tactic change

Last year around June 4th, Sina Weibo massively blocked common keywords such as “真相” (Truth), “今天” (Today) and “上证指数” (Shanghai Stock Exchange). You can see a comprehensive list of blocked searches collected by CDT with English translations in their fantastic stories "Sensitive Words: The Tiananmen Edition, parts one and two".

This time, Sina Weibo is returning seemingly uncensored results but is actually delivering completely unrelated information. For example, a search for “六四” (June 4th) will return information about “type 64 pistol”, “sixty and forty percent” and “Grade six Class four”. The keywords are indeed present in search results, tricking users into believing that everything is fine and there is nothing special about the keywords. This is a very effective form of censorship indeed - hiding information in plain sight.

This subtle censorship was immediately noticed by others who monitor censorship in China. William Farris, the author of the great blog Fei Chang Dao tweeted this almost immediately after Sina launched the change.

It seems like there is no longer any search censorship on Sina Weibo. I'm getting results for things like 自焚,艾未未,24周年

— William Farris (@wafarris) May 30, 2013

We discovered these results when we tested the system with keywords we knew to be blocked against similar keywords that are not blocked (as we described in our previous story). However, no average Weibo user would think about conducting such a detailed analysis. 

Sina's recent changes match the finding's in Gady Epstein's special report on China's internet and the "adaptive authoritarian". That authority is now making the giant cage invisible, leading people in the cage to believe they’re living in a broad and free world.