Days later, videos of chants and confrontations are still visible on the Chinese internet. It’s a sign of how a groundswell outmatched the world’s best internet control system.
By Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao and John Liu
November 30, 2022
In one video, a man sarcastically sings a patriotic song. In another, a group of protesters hold up blank pieces of paper and chant in unison. In a third clip, a group of mourners light candles around a vigil to those who died in a fire while in lockdown in western China.
Signs of organized dissent are relatively rare in China; so is their survival in the country’s digital space. China’s censorship apparatus — the most sophisticated of its kind in the world — has hunted down and deleted countless posts on social media showing the eruption of protests and anger at the government.
On Wednesday, it was unclear the extent of the protests, in part because of censorship, but new videos emerged of clashes the night before in the southern city of Guangzhou. Workers and residents resisting a Covid lockdown in an industrial district tore down barricades and threw bottles at riot police officers, as a top official in Beijing was ordering a crackdown on “sabotage activities by hostile forces.”
Yet over the past few days, as Chinese people frustrated by severe Covid lockdowns have taken to the streets, videos of the marches and rallies have continued to surface on Chinese sites such as WeChat, a chat app, and the short video sharing app, Douyin. Experts say the sheer volume of video clips has most likely overwhelmed the automated software and armies of censors China has tasked with policing the internet.
“This is a decisive breach of the big silence,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Once the anger spills onto the street, it becomes much harder to censor,” he added, pointing out that hundreds of demonstrators and onlookers posting videos from different angles are much harder for an algorithm to screen than a single viral video.
Internet users are also flipping videos on their side, using filters on them or recording videos of videos — creative tactics that have tripped up algorithms designed to flag the content.
Adding to the challenge for Chinese censors, the protests have shown that a growing number of Chinese people are using software to gain access to sites like Twitter and Instagram, which are blocked in China. Such foreign sites are beyond the reach of China’s officials, and can act as repositories for the videos, allowing them to be re-downloaded and reposted after they are deleted from the Chinese internet.
The sheer amount of footage speaks to the deep well of anger inside China against the country’s exceptionally stringent Covid policies that have affected hundreds of millions of people, especially over the past year. If China wanted to scrub the content completely, it would need to hire more people and develop far smarter algorithms, according to a former censor and an internet control expert.
A man looking through a gap in a barrier put in place as part of efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Shanghai.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters
China’s ruling Communist Party has long relied on a playbook of arrests, surveillance and censorship to quash dissent and exert its control over people. Security officials identify and round up those they consider instigators or leaders, monitor the movements of would-be critics and purge public platforms of information that would galvanize others. The faltering of its censorship system signals a new challenge for the party as it faces more open opposition than it has in a generation.
The death on Wednesday of a former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, added a layer of complexity to the party’s efforts to police public discourse. In several protest-themed chat groups that sprung up this week on the messaging app Telegram, messages were posted saying Mr. Jiang’s death presented an opportunity for protesters to gather in the name of mourning. On Weibo, censors moved quickly to scrub comments praising Mr. Jiang’s legacy that could have been construed as criticism of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian tendencies as China’s current leader — but many such comments continued to circulate widely.
Understand the Protests in China
The Toll of ‘Zero Covid’: The protests come as President Xi Jinping’s harsh pandemic policies have hurt businesses and strangled growth. The Daily looks at what the demonstrations could mean for Mr. Xi.
An Uncertain Moment: In a country where protests are swiftly quashed, many who are voicing their discontent are unsure how far to go.
The Economic Fallout: The growing unrest in the world’s biggest manufacturing nation is injecting a new element of uncertainty and instability into the global economy.
Facing Long Odds: The protesters in China hope to bring sweeping change, but three major forces stand in their way, our columnist writes.
Even before this week’s protests, China’s web controls were coming under strain. Internet platforms and their government overseers struggled to manage the outpouring of anger during a two-month lockdown in Shanghai this spring and after an autumn bus accident in which 27 people were killed while being transported to a quarantine facility.
This time, the immediate trigger for the protests was a fire that killed at least 10 people in the western city of Urumqi. Many suspected a lockdown had obstructed rescue efforts or trapped victims, although the authorities denied it.
Mr. Xiao, the Berkeley expert on censorship, said it had been easier for China to purge the internet of the “Voices of April,” a video chronicling the toll of the lockdown in Shanghai that was widely shared, than it was to censor videos this time. “They’re outgunned by the massive amount of content coming from all over the place.”
To truly deal with the flood of videos, platforms like WeChat and Douyin would have to hire 10 times the amount of staff they currently have, estimated one former censor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of government reprisals.
Censors use artificial intelligence to screen videos, he said, a system that works well identifying specific videos or objects, like candles or tanks, that indicate protest. But it often breaks down when trying to find more general categories of video. Tricks such as editing several videos together can flummox the software even more. To make a new algorithm catered to any given situation — such as images of crowds of people holding up pieces of paper, as in the case of the weekend’s protests — would be time consuming and costly, he said.
A number of accounts on Twitter have collected videos of the unrest from those behind China’s Great Firewall and posted them. Later they can be brought back onto the Chinese internet if censored. One popular Twitter account, “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher,” has over 700,000 followers. In the past week, it received over a thousand submissions a day from China, according to a painter in Italy administering the account who provided only his last name, Li.
“About a dozen messages come to my inbox every second,” Mr. Li said in an interview. “Information published in China is deleted very quickly, so people have no choice but to come to me.”
Mr. Li started to use Twitter actively five months ago after his account on Weibo, a Chinese site similar to Twitter, was deleted by censors dozens of times. On Weibo, Mr. Li had published content submitted from followers. He decided to keep doing so on Twitter.
As discontent over Covid policies has grown in recent weeks, the videos he reposted have attracted an increasingly large audience. He tried to authenticate them by cross-referencing different videos of the same event, but also acknowledges that he has limited expertise.
The exposure has also brought with it anxiety. On Monday, after his follower count grew to a half million, he faced an onslaught of reports for inappropriate content, a common tactic used by Chinese nationalist and government-backed accounts to stifle critics on Twitter.
With Twitter more relevant inside China than it has been in years, other campaigns appeared to target the spread of information there. In recent days, huge amounts of spam, often featuring lewd photos and videos, clustered around hashtags related to Chinese cities, some of which have been the locations of protests, according to an initial examination by an independent researcher. Although it’s not clear who is behind the spam, such campaigns to dilute politically sensitive posts and make them difficult to find are a common feature of Chinese overseas information campaigns.
Within China, the videos have helped attract protesters. A former journalist in Shanghai said he first stumbled on a vigil at Urumqi Road in the city on Saturday, but went out to join another protest the next day after seeing videos on WeChat from his friends at the gathering.
He, too, shared videos of the protest on WeChat, though he deleted them after 24 hours in an effort to evade the authorities, who had begun to go after some demonstrators. Though up only shortly, his videos changed the minds of two people he had thought would be unreceptive: his parents.
“My parents, like many Chinese parents, used to think what I’m doing is meaningless and childish, but they have changed dramatically in the past two days,” the former journalist said. His parents now understand why he would participate in such gatherings, he said, perhaps in part because they too have struggled under Covid controls.
Despite the breakthroughs, some warned that the censors would soon strike back, and might well recapture control of public opinion. Han Rongbin, a professor of media and politics at the University of Georgia who studies Chinese censorship, said that while he agreed the censors had been overwhelmed, their work, which has included pulling down huge numbers of posts and videos, had nonetheless been quite successful.
The goal of China’s censors isn’t to keep everyone in the dark, just enough people to ensure the spread of protest can be stopped. “I still think it’s quite effective, in that there is still a large number of people who are not sure what’s actually going on,” he said.
After the widespread demonstrations over the weekend, gatherings this week have been much smaller, as the authorities have smothered potential sites with heavy security. The question is how effective the censorship and other measures will be in deterring more protests in the days and weeks ahead.
Source: nytimes.com