At the OpenNetInitiative (a joint project of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre; the Advanced Network Research Group in the Cambridge Security Program at the University of Cambridge, and the Berkman Center), we released a new bulletin regarding the extent to which, and means by which, the Chinese government filters posts to weblogs via three major domestic weblog providers. The filtering occurs by keyword. From the bulletin:
“While Blogbus and Blogcn filter 18 of the 987 and 19 of the 987 keywords, Blogdriver filters 350 of the 987 keywords tested. The filtered keywords generally fall into five categories:
* National minorities’ independence movements: the well known Tibetan cause is represented as well as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The inclusion of some Taiwanese politicians’ names also fall into this category as they are all people who are known to support Taiwan independence.
* Tiananmen Square incident in 1989: it is referenced both by the full name, “Tiananmen massacre,” the Chinese custom of referencing important events by the number of the month and the day (in this case, 6-4), and also by reference to people involved — a mother of one of the victims who has been campaigning for human rights. The name of Zhao Ziyang, former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general, is also included in this category.
* Chinese communist leaders: a list of the top leaders, past and present, are included along with a particularly creative rewriting of Jiang Zemin by replacing one of the characters of his name by the character for “thief.”
* Falun Gong: a list of different names for Falun Gong including various spellings with characters that sound the same, often used to circumvent filtering.
* Sensitive words: a list of words referring to uprisings or suppression.”
The full list of keywords is here. These findings underscore the increasing importance of weblogs as a means of political speech.
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