Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

First, the blatant: China is the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information. Entire platforms that are hugely popular elsewhere in the world—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter—are blocked by the Chinese government. Particular terms like “Falun Gong”—the name of the banned spiritual group in China associated with one flank of the opposition—are simply absent from the country’s virtual public space, victims of official censorship or widespread self-censorship. On the Chinese Internet, you would be unable to find information about politically sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square protests, embarrassing information about the Chinese political leadership, the Tibetan rights movement and the Dalai Lama, or content related to human rights, political reform or sovereignty issues. When it comes to these topics, even some of the best-known Western media outlets fall victim to censorship. Bloomberg News was blocked in both English and Chinese following its June 2012 exposé on the vast family fortune of the then vice-president (and now president), Xi Jinping. Four months later, The New York Times experienced a similar fate after publishing a similar story about the then premier, Wen Jiabao. Unsurprisingly, information about censorship circumvention tools is also blocked. We learned how comprehensive and particular Chinese censorship authorities could be when, following a contentious trip by Google’s executive chairman, Eric, to Beijing in 2011, all traces of his visit were wiped from the Chinese Internet, while media coverage of his trip remained accessible everywhere else.

To the average Chinese user, this censorship is seamless—without prior knowledge of events or ideas, it would appear that they never existed. Further complicating matters, the Chinese government is not above taking a more proactive approach to online content: one estimate in 2010 suggested that Chinese officials had hired nearly three hundred thousand “online commenters” to write posts praising their bosses, the government and the Communist Party. (This kind of activity is often called Astroturfing—i.e., fake grassroots participation—and is a popular tactic with public-relations firms, advertising agencies and election campaigns around the world.)

China’s leadership doesn’t hesitate to defend its strict censorship policies. In a white paper released in 2010, the government calls the Internet “a crystallization of human wisdom” but states that China’s “laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of information that contains contents subverting state power, undermining national unity [or] infringing upon national honor and interests.” The Great Firewall of China, as the collection of state blocking tools is known, is nothing less than the guardian of Chinese statehood: “Within Chinese territory the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty. The Internet sovereignty of China should be respected and protected.” This type of unabashed and unapologetic approach to censorship would naturally appeal to states with strong authoritarian streaks, as well as states with particularly impressionable or very homogenous populations (who would fear the incursion of outside information on an emotional level).

Next, there are the sheepish Internet filterers: Turkey has taken a much more subtle approach than China, and has even shown responsiveness to public demands for Internet freedom, but nevertheless its online censorship policies continue with considerable obfuscation. The Turkish government has had an uneasy relationship with an open Internet, being far more tolerant than some of its regional neighbors but much more restrictive than its European allies. It is impossible to get a completely unfiltered connection to the Internet in Turkey—an important distinction between Turkey and Western countries. YouTube was blocked by Turkish authorities for more than two years after the company refused to take down videos that officials claimed denigrated the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. (In keeping with a 1951 law that criminalizes public insults to Atatürk, YouTube agreed to block the videos for the Turkish audience, but the government wanted them removed globally from the platform worldwide.) This ban was highly visible, but subsequent censorship has been more covert: Some eight thousand websites have been blocked in Turkey without public notice or official government confirmation.

The sheepish model is popular with governments that struggle to strike a balance between divergent beliefs, attitudes and concerns within their population. But by pursuing this path, the government itself can become the enemy if it goes too far, or if its machinations are exposed. To give a recent example from Turkey: In 2011, the government announced a new nationwide Internet filtering policy featuring a four-tier system of censorship, in which citizens would have to choose the level of filtering they wanted (from the most to least restrictive: “child,” “family,” “domestic” and “standard” levels). The Information and Communications Technologies Authority (known by its initials in Turkish as BTK) said the scheme was intended to protect minors and promised that people who chose the “standard” level would encounter no censorship. Many people skeptical of BTK’s record on transparency balked. In fact, the plan generated such an outcry among the population that thousands of people in more than thirty cities around Turkey took to the streets to protest the proposed changes.

Under pressure, the government dialed back its plan, ultimately instituting just two content filters—“child” and “family”—which users could adopt voluntarily. But the controversy didn’t end there. Media-freedom groups reported that their own tests of the censorship system revealed a more aggressive filtering framework than BTK would admit. In addition to the expected banned terms having to do with pornography or violent content, they found that ordinary news websites, content that was culturally liberal or Western (e.g., anything including the word “gay,” or information about evolution) and keywords related to the Kurdish minority were all blocked under the new system. Some activists argued that blocking information about Kurdish separatist organizations with the “child” filter was evidence of the state’s nefarious intent; the international media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders called the Turkish policy “backdoor censorship.”

The Turkish government responded to some of the public concerns about the new system. When a Turkish newspaper reported that educational websites about scientific evolution were blocked while content from a prominent Turkish creationist were not, the authorities eliminated the block immediately. But there is little to no transparency around what content is censored under these policies, so the government is forced to react only when such discrepancies are brought to light by citizens. The sheepish model of Internet filtering, then, combines a government’s ability to evade accountability with its willingness to take constructive action when pressure mounts. This approach would appeal to countries with growing civil societies but strong state institutions, or for governments without reliable bases of support but enough concentrated power to make such unilateral decisions.

The third approach, politically and culturally acceptable filtering, is employed by states as diverse as South Korea, Germany and Malaysia. This is limited and selective filtering around very specific content, based in law, with no attempt to hide the censorship or the motivations behind it. Outliers within the population might grumble, but the majority of citizens often agree with the filtering policies for reasons of security or public well-being. In South Korea, for example, the National Security Law expressly criminalizes public expressions of support for North Korea in both physical and virtual space. The South Korean government regularly filters Internet content affiliated with its northern neighbor—in 2010 it was reported that the government blocked some forty websites associated with or supportive of the North Korean regime, took down a dozen accounts with potential ties to Pyongyang on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and forced website administrators to delete more than forty thousand pro–North Korea blog posts.