Censorship on Chinese Video Platforms: New Citizen Lab Report

What keywords trigger censorship on Chinese video sites?
Thu, 2018-08-30 09:00

Chinese social video platforms implement widespread but inconsistent censorship mechanisms, new Citizen Lab research shows. ICFP fellows Jason Q. Ng and Jeffrey Knockel co-authored the report, which through reverse engineering uncovers some of the ‘why’ behind what content gets censored on Chinese social video sites. Among the key findings is a “dataset of 17,547 unique keywords used to trigger censorship,” which is “the largest dataset of sensitive keywords currently available to researchers.”

Read the Citizen Lab release and link to “Every Rose Has Its Thorn: Censorship and Surveillance on Social Video Platforms in China” here.

Coverage from Bloomberg.

Dataset available on Citizen Lab’s GitHub page.