How China censors the net: by making sure there's too much information

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 17, 2018 at 5:55:03 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How China censors the net: by making sure there's too much information
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How China censors the net: by making sure there’s too much information
> A new book shows how the republic’s government has adapted to the challenge of a networked age
> By John Naughton
> Jun 16 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/how-china-censors-internet-information>
>
> One of the axioms of the early internet was an observation made by John Gilmore, a libertarian geek who was one of 
> the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The internet,” said Gilmore, “interprets censorship as damage 
> and routes around it.” To lay people this was probably unintelligible, but it spoke eloquently to geeks, to whom it 
> meant that the architecture of the network would make it impossible to censor it. A forbidden message would always 
> find a route through to its destination.
>
> Gilmore’s adage became a key part of the techno-utopian creed in the 1980s and early 1990s. It suggested that neither 
> the state nor the corporate world would be able to censor cyberspace. The unmistakable inference was that the 
> internet posed an existential threat to authoritarian regimes, for whom control of information is an essential 
> requirement for holding on to power.
>
> In the analogue world, censorship was relatively straightforward. It merely required state control of all the main 
> communications media – print, radio and television – plus fear of draconian punishment for anyone daring to 
> circumvent the resulting restrictions on information citizens were allowed to see. The 20th century provided numerous 
> instances of how this worked – in fascist dictatorships, the Soviet empire and Mao’s China, for example – and how 
> effective it could be in the pre-digital age.
>
> Although much has changed since those dark days, it remains true that the internet (as distinct from the web) is 
> still very difficult to censor. And yet – despite that – authoritarian regimes are flourishing. How come?
>
> The answer, in a nutshell, is that they have sharpened up their act. In the process, some have displayed remarkable 
> insights into the nature and affordances of network technology, insights that some democratic governments still don’t 
> seem to appreciate. And at the cutting edge of the new approach to censorship that has emerged is – surprise, 
> surprise! – the People’s Republic of China.
>
> In 2015, commenting on the fact that Chinese internet users generated 30bn pieces of information a day, a former 
> director of the country’s state internet information office observed that “it is not possible to apply censorship to 
> this enormous amount of data. Thus censorship is not the correct word choice. But no censorship does not mean no 
> management.”
>
> Note that last sentence. The quote comes from a remarkable new book – Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside 
> China’s Great Firewall – by Margaret Roberts, one of a number of dedicated scholars who have for some years being 
> studying how the Chinese regime is “managing” the internet. What these scholars have been unearthing is a detailed 
> picture of “networked authoritarianism” (to use the academic Rebecca MacKinnon’s term) in action. Roberts’s book is a 
> magisterial summary of what we have learned so far.
>
> In essence, the Chinese approach is a combination of technocratic realism and political nous. It accepts that, in the 
> end, Gilmore’s axiom still applies, but not the techno-utopian conclusion that effective censorship is therefore 
> impossible. It just needs to be updated for a digital age.
>
> Censorship 2.0 is based on the idea that there are three ways of achieving the government’s desire to keep 
> information from the public – fear, friction and flooding. Fear is the traditional, analogue approach. It works, but 
> it’s expensive, intrusive and risks triggering a backlash and/or the “Streisand effect” – when an attempt to hide a 
> piece of information winds up drawing public attention to what you’re trying to hide (after the singer tried to 
> suppress photographs of her Malibu home in 2003).
>
> Friction involves imposing a virtual “tax” (in terms of time, effort or money) on those trying to access censored 
> information. If you’re dedicated or cussed enough you can find the information eventually, but most citizens won’t 
> have the patience, ingenuity or stamina to persevere in the search. Friction is cheap and unobtrusive and enables 
> plausible denial (was the information not available because of a technical glitch or user error?).
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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