Internet Censorship (Part 2): The Technology of Information Control, Townsend Fellowships for Library and Museum Professionals, www.website.com/how-to-overthrow-Iranian-regime/. Another federal judge questioned whether the order would harm First Amendment rights, arguing that it would shut down the primary means of communication for the Chinese community. WeChat is one of the only social media platforms available to users in China, so users abroad rely on WeChat to stay connected with their families, friends, and business partners in China. Just as a U.S. citizens knowledge of their Fourth Amendment rights may lead them to refuse a warrantless search of their residence without fear of criminal exposure, a university student in Chinas knowledge of the contours of internet regulations may lead them to engage in political expression with less inhibition. The basic principles behind the algorithms that social media companies use to detect certain types of content on their sites are also used in other contexts throughout society - sometimes with far-reaching implications that can affect people's lives and livelihoods. Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent). By now, that is black letter law. When it finally returned Fallons manuscript, the government required 113 separate redactions, several more than two pages long. Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent). They found that one trained on Chinese Wikipedia assigned more positive scores to headlines that mentioned terms including election, freedom, and democracy, while the one trained on Baidu Baike assigned more positive scores to headlines featuring surveillance, social control, and CCP. The study will be presented at the 2021 Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) in March. Here Are 9 Useful Resources. The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Before 2015, many Chinese scientists and citizens used virtual private networks (VPNs) to route their internet traffic through foreign servers, bypassing the firewalls on Chinese servers and staying hidden from government surveillance. This issue even occurs in the United States. When a government has the power to block access to large parts of the internet, how can we be sure that theyre not blocking more than theyre letting on?. One of our clients is Mark Fallon, who spent almost three decades with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and two years at the Department of Homeland Security. Featured photo: cc/(LewisTsePuiLung, photo ID: 518504653, from iStock by Getty Images), A newly published international report confirms global warming has damaged coral reefs throughout the worlds oceans. South Korea is a highly wired country with one of world's fastest Internet speeds. Home. This push towards a divided internet limits global conversations and collaboration, while further polarizing each nation by creating echo chambers in which we can only hear our own voices. In addition to traditional censorship, Khattak also highlights a new kind of censorship publisher-side censorship where websites refuse to offer services to a certain class of users. This is why internet censorship is so concerning., While the cat and mouse game between the censors and their opponents will probably always exist, says Khattak. Leaders of the China Democracy Party and Falun Gong were traced and imprisoned. This post was designed to get humanists up to speed on the technology of the problem. An analysis of misinformation from five samples across the United States, Europe, and Mexico showed that substantial portions of each populationanywhere from 15% to 37%believed misinformation about COVID-19 in April and May 2020, representing what the authors call a "major threat to public health.". Over one-quarter of everyone who is online right now lives in a nation where at least one person was arrested for content that they liked, shared, or published on Facebook. Controlling for demographic variables, such as age, and including the scores for each variable in a hierarchical regression model, Lu and Zhao find that a one-unit increase in a persons degree of awareness of internet laws and regulations is associated with a 4.3 percentage point increase in the likelihood that he or she will engage in political protest. The 13 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride, The Best Barefoot Shoes for Walking or Running, Power Up Anywhere With Our Favorite Portable Chargers, Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution. The government has an interest in protecting legitimate national-security secrets, but the current prepublication review system needs to be overhauled. Another of our clients former CIA officer Mel Goodman waited more than 11 months for his book, a memoir about his time in government that was critical of the agency, to clear prepublication review. They sent the pair back home the next day. It is something that can be enacted by regulators, private organizations, or even at individual's initiative. The United States and China are essentially waging an internet sovereignty war, where each side employs the tactics of the other. While US citizens would still be able access TikTok and WeChat if the apps are already on their device, they would not receive new software updates, effectively resulting in the apps becoming unusable over time. While ideological beliefs, education, and media consumption play into how individuals engage politically, the awareness and perception that citizens have of how their government regulates content on the internet may affect how willing they are to express their political beliefs or engage in protest. Clean Cloud: Prevent US personal information and intellectual property (ex. The process of deep packet inspection examines packet contents for banned keywords. But the key point is to stop that information from being disseminated. Some countries even require individual personal computers to include software that filters internet content. Implementing a mild form of Internet censorship could help to pump the brakes on this issue. For all the controversy it caused, Fitna is not a great film. Lu and Zhao gauge the feelings of students, asking how aware they are of regulations within internet censorship law, how frequently they engage in online political expression and political protest, and the degree of concern they feel about being punished for engaging in political protest. It is also possible that Chinese Wikipedia contains anti-Chinese or overtly pro-democracy content, he says. New research shows how government censorship affects AI algorithmsand can influence the applications built with those algorithms. He believes the redactions were largely intended to avoid embarrassing the agency, not to protect information that is legitimately classified. For a more powerful censoring technique, governments may use URL filtering. Upon the introduction of these policies, Beijing has expressed outrage at the clear distrust of Chinese companies and government. They also paint foreign influences as intruders upon the nations internet (though the internet was not created with state borders or separations), with Chinas policies warding against almost all foreign nations while the Clean Network specifically targets China. Entrepreneurs who are trying to do business overseas in countries where Internet censorship exists will quickly find numerous roadblocks standing in their way. First, awareness of internet law is positively correlated with political expression. Roberts says researchers and policymakers need to consider how governments in the future might influence how AI systems are trained in order to make censorship more effective or export particular values. To understand internet censorship, we must first go back to the development of the initial protocols of the web: the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Pompeos press statement delineates five principles of a clean network: The justification for these restrictive, China-centered policies are summed up in Pompeos concluding sentence: building a Clean fortress around our citizens data will ensure all of our nations security. Ironically, the Chinese government similarly often cites national security to justify its harsh restrictions, even when empirical evidence does not support their claims. In other cases, Internet service providers and hosting companies are privately owned but often abide by government censoring demands in order to continue doing business in a particular country. Global internet freedom has declined as countries have imposed stricter censorship policies and weaponized social media as a tool to advance state agendas. Nov 13, 2016, 9:43 PM PST. But when users arent able to access a particular site, they often dont know whether its because the site is down, or if some force is preventing them from accessing it. 2. Although Pakistan has been intermittently blocking content since 2006, a more persistent blocking policy was implemented in 2011, when porn content was censored in response to a media report that highlighted Pakistan as the top country in terms of searches for porn. It is something that can be enacted by regulators, private organizations, or even at individuals initiative. Frese eventually had the charges dropped against him, but it doesnt change the dangers that people face when Internet censorship is a priority for an administration. By turning other countries against Chinese media and the CCP, the Trump administration may be attempting to assert US dominance in the international cybersphere and promote a pro-American internet free of Chinese influence. Electric Vehicles Are Not the Solution. A desirable property, of any censorship resistance system is to ensure that users are not traceable, but usually users have to combine them with anonymity services such as Tor. This lack of efficiency can significantly slow economic growth, especially for corporations who struggle to keep their websites online due to Chinas commercial censorship aimed specifically at foreign industries. 6. Contact Emilie; Articles. Internet censorship limits new ideas and business opportunities. Their passports were confiscated, and they were interrogated for several hours including an overnight stay in a holding cell. Like many others in the global trade community, these corporations cite that Chinas restrictions are unjustly discriminatory towards foreign industry. There will always be a privileged few who operate outside of the legal framework that everyone must follow. Censorship can occur at one point on the internet circuit, can manifest as a blanket filter for all connections in a given country or can be micro-focused on individual sites, machines, and even words. If the target Web site is hosted on a shared hosting server, all sites existing on the same server will be blocked as well, even if they are not targeted for filtering themselves. Internet censorship removes one of the checks against the government. Despite crackdowns on these protests, Hong Kong citizens elected pro-democracy officials into their city council. People can be told what to do, think, or say in this circumstance. Any attempt to visit a site on a blacklist fails. Or take software-makers. Second, the more that university students view internet censorship laws as a threat, the less likely they are to engage in political expression. It can be used to block access to websites or materials deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Things could get much worse. Censorship is not a new thing, says Khattak. Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. I hope that studies such as mine will illuminate and bring more transparency to this opaque and complex subject, and inform policy around the legality and ethics of such practices.. However, President Xis 2015 crackdown on VPNs made it nearly impossible to use them within Chinas cyber-borders. Battling a lack of truth with regulations that encourage ignorance or silence will only dumb down society further. Wi-Fi is distributed throughout most major cities and social media is easy to access. Venkatasubramanian points out that AI algorithms trained on Western news articles might contain their own anti-China biases. It can even be an activity which allows households to conform to specific societal norms. Then this process can extend to other aspects of life as well. We now have social media sites which have loads of user-generated content, so its very difficult for a censor to retain control of this information because theres so much of it. Most Web filters use two main techniques to block content: Blacklists and keyword blocking. Chinas internet is notoriously unreliable and ranks 91st in the world for speed due to its large network of censors and restrictions, despite its general improvement in internet infrastructure. Additional Articles; Credits; Blog; Books; Huffington Post; New York Times; Foulkeways Bulletin. Individual port numbers can also be blacklisted, restricting access to services such as Web or email. He was using a slang term for partying, but officials didnt have a sense of humor. When these processes are used to provide security and protection, then it can lead to a healthier perspective. Third, students with a lower awareness of Chinese internet censorship laws psychologically perceive these laws as more threatening. But if youre a government wanting to block all information on subject X, this can be a problem. The goal of TCP/IP was to connect multiple networks and to . In the case of the blocking of YouTube in 2012 in Pakistan, a lot of the demand went to rival video sites like Daily Motion. All of this raises the thorny issue of censorship. A 19-year-old named Justin Carter threatened to shoot up a kindergarten class in 2013 allegedly in response to gaming activities. Clean Cable: Protect undersea cables from intelligence gathering by the PRC. When he finally got the manuscript back, the CIA insisted that he redact pages of information that was already in the public domain. Hirst adds that it is unclear how the sentiment analysis was done and whether bias may have been introduced there. Censorship and legal intercept (which affect privacy) are two of the most powerful cybertools in a nation-state's arsenal. Internet censorship can lead to a misinterpretation of the facts. Its like an arms race, because the technology which is used to retrieve and disseminate information is constantly evolving, says Khattak. By creating options that allow parents to control what their children view, they can block access to pornography, violence, and other forms of scary items that they may feel is harmful. Internet censorship leads to ignorance. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries.

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