Frequently updated with high-resolution photos of the president and other officials, Chinese netizens suspect Xi Jinping’s Facebook page is a government project.

• Xi+facebook (习+facebook): Xi Jinping’s Facebook page looks suspiciously professional to discerning Chinese netizens. Could it be an official account? Over 16,000 users “like” his page, while the new president “likes” Li Keqiang, the People’s Liberation Army, and “Chinese Military Power.”
• Xi+facebook (习+脸谱)
• Chairman xi (xi主席)

• one party holds power (一党执政)
• Domestic Security Department (国保)
• martial law (戒严)

• Toady (蛤蛤): A pejorative nickname for Jiang Zemin.
• Toad thread (蛤丝)
• Chairman Toad (蛤主席)

• general election (普选): Retested.

All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

Browse all of CDT’s collected sensitive words in this bilingual Google spreadsheet.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Facebook, Internet censorship, Jiang Zemin, Ministry of Truth, Sensitive Words Series, weibo, Xi Jinping
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Alibaba, Zeng predicted, will eventually connect in some way with Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Apple, Baidu, LinkedIn and others to create a giant trusted virtual “global commercial grid,” where individuals and companies will offer their talents and buy and sell products, designs and inventions.

Eventually, Zeng argued, “every individual will have to find a way to succeed” on this global grid. “National boundaries will offer you no protection.”

The other trend is that the Chinese will be big players on this grid. The creation of global trusted business frameworks like Alibaba is starting to enable a new generation of Chinese innovators — who are low cost, but high skilled — to extend their reach. We’ve seen cheap labor out of China; now we’re going to see more cheap genius.

Which is why Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder, in a recent essay on Eurozine.com, argued that a big shift of the global labor market is under way, in which “many of the things we thought could only be done in the West can now be done anywhere in the world, not only more cheaply but sometimes better.”

Economist George Magnus writes in The Financial Times that as China loses its edge as a manufacturing hub, its growth model must “shift towards transformative technology and innovation” to remain competitive:

China’s manufacturing strategies will have to get smarter. Its 13 per cent of global R&D spending and prowess in incremental process innovation will have to focus more on product innovation, management organisation and the fusion of new information, biological, and materials technologies. Its prominence in patent registrations masks weakness in indicators such as cited patents. Chinese scientists and engineers are prolific, but their work is often viewed as a triumph of quantity over sometimes dubious quality.

It may be hard to overcome these shortcomings, which are rooted in a tradition that has rewarded good administrators over freethinking innovators, and made it hard for individuals to exchange ideas. It has also discouraged the curiosity, critical spirit and collaborative approach that are the hallmarks of advanced manufacturing.

These problems will not retard Chinese innovation and technological competitiveness forever. But to adapt, China requires extensive political reform, more robust institutions and a tilt in the role of the state towards supporting enterprise. It will not be helped by the uncertainty over the nature of its downturn and the consequences of the leadership change.

See also previous CDT coverage of innovation in China.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, globalization, Hangzhou, innovation, LinkedIn
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In the world’s largest democracy, recent fears of pogroms and ethnic violence have highlighted just how fractious and febrile India’s social makeup is. Rumors circulating last week of planned attacks on migrants from the Indian Northeast saw tens of thousands of Northeasterners in some of India’s main cities cram onto trains bound for their remote homelands. The “exodus” — as it was branded in bold block letters by the Indian media — followed earlier incidents of ethnic strife in the northeastern state of Assam, where members of the indigenous Bodo tribe clashed with Bengali Muslim settlers, driving hundreds of thousands of Muslims out of their homes. Mass SMSes, emails and posts over Facebook and Twitter warned of (and, in some cases, encouraged) Muslim reprisal attacks on Northeasterners in cities like India’s tech capital, Bangalore, as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan drew to a close, sparking a nationwide panic.

The government’s efforts to stem the panic included a flurry of take-down requests to Google, Twitter and Facebook, as well as limited blocks on webpages from Al Jazeera, The Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Wikipedia. While there has been some speculation about ulterior motives behind this response, The Atlantic’s Max Fisher wrote that the episode raises difficult questions about the role of social networks in spreading the hysteria.

Technology didn’t cause any of this, of course. But social media and text messaging, both of which are becoming increasingly common in reaches of India’s enormous lower and middle classes, accelerated the flow of rumors and of inflammatory images. Some of the material turns out to have been fake: doctored images and videos showed anti-Muslim attacks that never happened. Because the rumors can be self-fulfilling, their lightening-fast spread across India’s vast population, much of which is very newly connected to the web, can be costly. The original 1993 crisis displaced an estimated 20,000 people, but this most recent manifestation has already displaced 300,000, and killed 80. No doubt there are many factors that might explain the new severity of this old crisis, but with the spread of rumors apparently playing a significant role, the recent explosion in Indian Internet access rates (the 100 millionth Indian web users logged on in December) could be relevant. The government, unable to counter the destabilizing rumors, shut down some of the means of their dispersal.

[…] When world governments in places like Ethiopia or China censor the internet, they tend to cite some version of the same basic idea: free discussion is a threat to “national stability.” Typically, web freedom activists perceive this as little more than an excuse for online authoritarianism, and they’re probably often correct. But what if, in India’s case, the government could actually be right? Can Photoshopping up some “evidence” of ethnic attacks be akin to inciting violence? What about sending a text message falsely claiming such attacks, for which a Bangalore man was arrested? At what point does a Facebook rumor become a cry of “fire” in the crowded theatre of Indian ethnic anxieties?

Chinese authorities have long used the “cancer” (or bats) of potentially destabilising online rumours to justify Internet controls. The exodus in India, argued Global Times, demonstrated the danger posed by “unchecked websites”, and the need for tough measures to control them:

[…] What happened in India can help us understand more objectively whether the Internet can foment social instability and how it does so. The exodus was a result of public panic that was easily ignited by rumors. It takes more than working with social networking websites to appease the agitated public and prevent this from happening again.

But New Delhi’s worries that the Internet promoted the rumors didn’t come out of nowhere. As the inventor of social networking sites, the US has experience in regulating them. But these websites have caused disturbances in other countries. The unrest in the UK last summer exposed the side effects of these networking sites, prompting the government to ponder blocking Internet information flow in times of emergency, a decision that led to an outcry.

[…] India is a poor country. Survival is top priority for the majority of the population. Every piece of information carried by the Internet or cell phone looks real to grass-roots people.

China’s situation is relatively good. It is hard to imagine rumors causing an exodus. The government’s reaction and public’s ability to discern false information are much better. But the mass of information flowing through the Internet still presents a challenge to governance. The Internet has become deeply integrated in Chinese society, but can still create a disturbance.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Global Times, Google, India, Internet censorship, social stability, Twitter
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Beyond the snark and the state media, a more earnest discussion has gathered force. Despite years of investment and official injunctions to advance Chinese technology, China has yet to produce a brand or original tech product with a fraction of the global influence of Facebook or Apple. Chen Yongdong, a Shanghai-based technology writer, adapted the title of a famous Chinese poem for an essay he called “Raising My Head to Look Up to Facebook; Lowering My Head to Think About Its Chinese Counterparts.” He wrote: “If you don’t have innovation, are you not going to be laughed at by the industry, and by the world?”

In all likelihood, China is approaching the end of its run as the world’s low-skilled workshop. There are fewer workers, and they are pursuing more income and skills; Vietnam and other neighbors are cheaper. The larger problem is existential: The nation that so often reminds the world that it invented printing, paper, gunpowder, and the compass is exceedingly uncomfortable about how far back it has to reach to name its world-beating inventions. China has excelled in several pockets of innovation (genomics and nanotechnology, for example) but those are the exception; Chinese technology is now best known for “process innovation”—reducing the cost of producing, say, low-end mobile phones for Huawei—and for the distinctly Chinese term, “re-innovation,” which involves making something simpler or cheaper than the original.

Even successful Chinese Internet companies, such as Tencent and Alibaba, are respected for their business achievements, not for their original insights. The obstacles are not a mystery: The government has failed to protect intellectual property or promote small- and medium-sized businesses with good ideas, to name a couple of factors.

Imagine, for a moment, the Chinese version of the Facebook story: A no-name undergrad in the Tsinghua University computer-science department gains notoriety for a high-profile prank that makes the university concerned about its digital security; instead of getting expelled, he starts a company, drops out, attracts prominent investors despite ignoring powerful players in the field, is invited to meet the President of the country, continues expanding, goes public, and makes billions. Impossible—for all kinds of reasons (a Chinese student who toys with a university network might not be enrolled by the end of the day), but the most vexing question may be, as an editorial in Nature once put it, “whether a truly vibrant scientific culture is possible without a more widespread societal commitment to free expression.”

The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report, however, claims that China can still teach Facebook a thing or two:

With traffic quickly migrating from personal computers to mobile devices, all of the big Chinese Internet companies are pushing hard into mobile, but some with more success than others. Though Mark Zuckerberg is well aware of the mobile challenge, he might think about following in Tencent’s footsteps, and instead of working on a more streamlined Facebook app or some grander mobile operating system, make a new mobile product from scratch.

China’s largest internet conglomerate, Tencent, launched a new mobile chat service last year called Weixin.

On top of its mobile chat function, Weixin has integrated audio and photo sharing and other quirky features, one of which allows users to shake their phone and start up a conversation with strangers shaking their phone in the area. According to the Chinese media it’s also testing a new circles feature, that has the uncanny power to automatically categorize friends and contacts based on how a person knows them, and even throws in a few similar strangers for good measure.

…

As Kaifu Lee, former head of China for Google points out, what has set Weixin apart is it has left completely behind the “baggage” of being a PC product.

“Facebook’s client was not inventive from the get go for the mobile experience, [it was] just aiming for functional compatibility with desktop version. That may on the positive side it will be more friendly to the desktop client, but the downside is it’s not optimized for mobile,” he said.

See also speculation in Forbes on what impact Facebook’s IPO will have on China’s top social network, Renren.

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, innovation, IPO, renren, social media, social networking
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Analysts say the longer Facebook takes to enter China, the harder it will become for the firm to crack the market.

“The point is that they have already missed out on it,” Michael Clendenin of Red Tech Advisors in Beijing tells the BBC.

“They will be naive to think that just because they are Facebook they will be able to come in and capture the market.”

China already has a thriving and fast-growing social networking market and the sector is controlled by domestic players.

Even the official China Daily is asking the question:

While Facebook faces concerns about the durability of its business model, which relies heavily on advertising, some analysts believe the social networking behemoth will seek to enter China, where its services are not yet available, to grow revenue.

In its original prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February, China was mentioned nine times, clearing indicating “the country is under serious consideration as a new market for the social network”, said Jon Russell, Asia editor of NextWeb, a technology site.

“It’s very likely that Facebook’s goal is to expand very rapidly. It is looking at China because it’s the only field left open for them,” said Jeffrey Barlow, director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University in Oregon.

While China Daily acknowledges that Facebook services “are not available” in China, it does not explain the reasons: The site has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China since 2009. As a result, in an infographic on Facebook use in Asia, China is missing.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, foreign IT companies, Great Firewall
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This involved setting up fake Facebook accounts bearing his name in the hope that those close to him would be lured into making contact or answering private messages, potentially giving away personal details about Stavridis or themselves.

This type of “social engineering” impersonation is an increasingly common web fraud. Nato said it wasn’t clear who was responsible for the spoof Facebook pages, but other security sources pointed the finger at China.

Last year, criminals in China were accused of being behind a similar operation, which was given the codename Night Dragon. This involved hackers impersonating executives at companies in the US, Taiwan and Greece so that they could steal business secrets.

The latest disclosure will add to growing fears in the UK and US about the scale of cyber-espionage being undertaken by China. As well as targeting senior figures in the military, the tactic has been blamed for the wholesale theft of valuable intellectual property from some leading defence companies.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cyberattacks, cyberespionage, Facebook, hacking, NATO
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Developers of software from China make up about 20 percent of Facebook’s partner network in Asia, David Lim, a partner engineer at the company’s mobile developer relations division, said in an interview in Hong Kong today. Chinese app developers are using Facebook (FB) to reach overseas users, Lim said, without providing figures.

Facebook is wooing software firms in China to help bolster its apps lineup for the more than 800 million people worldwide who use its social-networking service. The Menlo Park, California-based company last month said in its filing for a proposed $5 billion initial public offering that it is continuing to evaluate entering China, the world’s biggest Internet market.

“We now have Chinese-language help pages for developers, and we are working on giving them better support,” said Lim. “Developers in mainland China are important to us.”

Last year, Facebook set up an office in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, and said it may win business from Chinese advertisers.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, social networking
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There’s been a lot talk about microblogging services as a game-changer in China because of how quickly information spreads on them. Do you agree?

People said that about the Internet more generally when it showed up in China in 1995, when I was based in Beijing with CNN. The widespread assumption among the foreign press corps at the time was that the CCP was unlikely to survive the Internet. But so far it has done a much better job at riding the changes the Internet has wrought – and adapting to them and even taking advantage of some of them – than we ever imagined.

Yes, information spreads faster with Weibo than on earlier forms of social networks and that will certainly lead to various kinds of change. But specifically how will the “game” (whatever that is exactly) be changed? And precisely in what direction? And can we assume that direction will actually be democratic? As the daughter of a professor of Chinese history, I think we should be careful about making assumptions about where things are going, particularly when those assumptions are based in no small part on what we hope will happen.

Tea Leaf Nation highlights a recent illustration of microblogs’ unsteadiness as platforms for change: the (now reversed) deletion of two Sina Weibo users’ accounts after they posted a politically sensitive image. This prompted widespread indignation among other users, including Beijing advertising executive Zhuang Wuxie, who asked:

1. What is Sina Weibo’s standard for deleting tweets? Under reasonable and legal circumstances, will freedom of speech receive its deserved support and protection here?

2. What is Sina Weibo’s standard for deleting user accounts? No matter what the reason, if we don’t violate the law shouldn’t our voices and tweets on this platform be preserved and our data be retrievable?

3. Can Sina Weibo adopt the posture of a normal media outlet and not be subjective and certainly not use its power to oppress users who are just passing along information? If you can’t do this shouldn’t you apologize to your users?”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, Internet censorship, microblogs, Rebecca MacKinnon, sina weibo, Twitter
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Facebook said last week it was contemplating re-entering China, the world’s second biggest economy, after being blocked nearly three years ago.

But its offering would likely face intense competition, political meddling and little commercial success.

Few foreign internet companies have succeeded in China. EBay Inc, Google Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Yahoo Inc and most recently Groupon Inc form the list of notable online players who have failed to gain traction in the fast-growing nation of 1.3 billion people.

“It’s actually a bit late for Facebook,” said Hong Kong-based CLSA analyst Elinor Leung, who added that the market was already quite saturated with local players such as Sina Corp, Renren Inc, Kaixinwang001 and Tencent Holdings.

Read more about Facebook in China, via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, foreign IT companies, Great Firewall
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- A female colleague just came back from a blind date. She is quite excited. She said to me, this man is quite accomplished. He is just over thirty and is already the Chief Manager of the China Office of the Facebook. I said to her: grab him, don’t miss this one.

Following are some of the comments under this post:

- We are in the same business then. I am the CEO of the China office of Youtube*.

- I won’t tell you that I am the chief representative of the China office of Twitter*.

- I am exactly 30 this year. My father is the Commander-in-Chief of Mongolia’s Navy.

- Facebook’s prospectus has listed four countries which limited their citizens to visit their website: Syria, Iran, China, and North Korea. These are what in history books will be called the “four ancient civilizations.”

- The acronym [of the "four ancient civilizations"] is SICK.

- The sin of Facebook is that it lets people meet whom they want to meet. The sin of Twitter is that it lets people say what they want to say. The sin of Google is that it lets people know what they want to know. The sin of YouTube is that it lets people show the reality which needs to be shown. Almost all the world’s top ten websites are blocked in China. Why do we want to be the enemy of those technologies that have changed the world?

* [YouTube and Twitter are also blocked inside China]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Internet censorship, jokes, Twitter
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@AmericanMike: Hello everyone. My name is Mike. I’m from the U.S. I’ve just arrived in Beijing. I want to contact my family members through Facebook, but I can’t… Is there any way to get on Facebook?

@美国人麦克:大家好，我叫麦克，来自美国，我刚到北京，我想上facebook和家人联系，但是上不去了，有什么办法吗？

This tweet soon generated a large number of comments from Chinese netizens, many of which have been re-posted on various online discussion forums and social media sites.  Following are some examples of the comments translated by CDT:

@wenlongxiong: Across the Great Firewall, we can reach every corner of the world [This is a reference to the first email sent out from China in 1987, which read: "Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world"]

@shennanyunfu: A: Go home! B: Scale the wall.

@kenneth_wang_wei：Please contact the police should you encounter any problems*. [This sentence was translated as “difficult to find the police” on an information board in a popular tourist attraction of Jiangxi province. A picture of this board was widely re-posted on cyberspace.]

@duoluoxi-tuotuo: Welcome to the Great Chinese LAN.

@ajichihuo: Once you overthrow our government, you’ll be able to access Facebook.

@yan-at-shanghai: Bro, once you are in China, you’d better to use QQ and Renren.com*. And you should let your American family members to learn how to use QQ and Renren.  [*Renren.com is a popular social networking site in Mainland China that is similar to Facebook.]

@youmutianna: According to our relevant laws and regulations, your request is denied.

@anarchy_whale: If you are unable to scale the wall, you’ll have to bring your friends and family to Sina Weibo…

@yimanfu: Two methods: First, join our revolution and help us build a democratic government — this method will solve the problem once and for all, and it’ll ensure your access to Facebook the next time you’re in Beijing; second, use circumvention tools such as Autoproxy or Freegate (thanks to your government for funding these tools, which have been helping us learn a lot of truths) — this method is easy and low-cost, but I can’t guarantee it’ll always work.

@Nanyiqichidechunjie:  Foreign Ministry Spokesperson: You need to obey China’s relevant laws and regulations. You can let your family members sign up for Kaixin001.com*. [Kaixin001.com is another popular social networking site in Mainland China.]

@feishangzhe: Bingo! Lost connection means you are in China.

@zengjianren: Please go to Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and look for President Fang Binxing.

@wolaiwozhengfu: You guys are so unfriendly towards our foreign friend. All you care about is money!//@lalalala: Your excellency, I can offer you a magical software that only costs 49.98 U.S. dollars //@mohuluojia: Your excellency, I can offer you a magical software that only costs 49.99 U.S. dollars. //@pikemeng: Your excellency, I can offer you a magical software that it only costs 50 U.S. dollars.

@Qingtianbairi: If you have an Android phone, please download Puffin Browser. So you can access Facebook without circumvention.

@wonverjiaoliangxiaoxiao: I can loan you my “little dove.” [“Little dove” is a nickname of the popular free circumvention tool named “Freegate.”]

@XeonivX: If you’re unwilling to break the law, you can teach your family members how to use Renren.com*. But it takes some knowledge of Chinese language…

@Yizhangbanzhuanlian: Why the hell wouldn’t you just call them?

@Paiyunchu: It’s how it is here. Facebook has always been blocked in China for the purpose of maintaining stability. We used to be able to access it through circumvention, but since the October 1st National day is approaching, China is blocking the Internet even more desperately. So circumvention is really difficult these days. But you know, there’s Kaixin001.com in China, which is the “stabilized” copycat version of Facebook. So why don’t you invite your family members to Kaixin001? Haha! I’m not sure whether you’d understand what I’ve just said. If not, please ask some Chinese students for explanation.

@gezhidaoni: So why did you even come to China? It’s just a piece of crap here. Internet surfing in China is limited to the Great Chinese LAN–there is no  external network! We can’t receive any information from the outside world! In China you can only be a frog in the well and all you can see is what’s above you! I urge you to go back to the U.S.! China’s ditch oil and 70KPH can both make you disappear without a trace! The point is: The Celestial Empire is dangerous!

@BuzhuangAbuzhuangC: Why do you need Facebook? You should watch CCTV’s News Simulcast and read People’s Daily as well as Global Times so that you can experience the superiority of socialism.

@yanwuyo: Thank you for testing our Great Chinese LAN. Apparently, it’s worth our taxpayers’ money. For someone that’s newly arrived like you, please just go with the flow. It’s such a great effort of our government. And as an American, why are you trying to access an American website in China here? You’re definitely causing trouble here. I’d like to represent the Chinese taxpayers who wish to peacefully live in the Great Chinese LAN and offer you the most tepid protest.

@Lanlingfeiniao: Isn’t he stupid? Why do you need Facebook in the Celestial Empire? Please watch CCTV’s News Simulcast, which enables you to know the entire world simultaneously. Oh yeah, let me check my Alipay* account and see if I’ve gotten paid 50 cents. [*Alipay is a Chinese third-party online payment platform that’s similar to Paypal. ]

@Zhuyili: In the Celestial Empire, Facebook has to die. [*Facebook is often phonetically translated into Chinese as “has-to-die.” (Fei Si Bu Ke, 非死不可)]

@Xiaokunjun: Hurry up and travel backward in time. It’s 1997 here.

@WeilianchumozhuyiIX: Had to quietly bookmark this post…

@V-LiLLian: Scale the wall!  You can jump out of the window and crouch on top of the wall, then you will be able to access Facebook.

@: What “Fei Si Bu Ke*”? There is nothing called “Fei Si Bu Ke”! Which work unit are you from?

@yimuxiaoseng: Bro, go back to the U.S. It’s Mars here.

@Ciscogeek: Make your American family convert to Communism and start using Sina Weibo–problem solved!

@Tailszhihun: I have nothing else to say but asking you: what kind of madness you were in so that you have decided to come to China?

@lingzhaoran: …. my friend, this is a wrong station to get off… you should keep flying to Tokyo.

@FreeDroid: Kiddo, if you didn’t know enough about this place, you shouldn’t have come.

@Zhuanyeqihong: I’d like to suggest you call the U.S. Embassy and urge them to solve this problem. If you succeed, Chinese people will remember you.

@XTxiaotian: This place is also known as “West Korea.”

@Lee-Imagine: Haha, you should let your whole family sign up for Renren.com, so maybe they’ll find their long-lost first love.

@Yuhao: They are so considerate that they’re afraid that the Facebook server cannot handle the traffic because of China’s large population.

@-Chilanqiao-: My dear, you’ve got into the wrong country. This is a sanctuary where this is no Facebook or Twitter!

@sim_Zhou: As a host, I’d suggest you to look for Hongxing*, since she’s the only person who can scale the wall. [*Hongxing (红杏) literally means “red plum blossom” in Chinese and is used as a word game here. “Red plum blossom scaling the wall (红杏出墙)” is a Chinese idiom meaning having an affair.]

© sandra for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Great Firewall, Internet censorship
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Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly. And thank goodness ….

What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety. If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously.

© samuel wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, Internet privacy, social networking
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“In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for-the stories go-once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again …”

— Vernor Vinge, “True Names“, 1981

Ai Weiwei has recently joined Google+, having fallen silent on Twitter since his release last month. From Penn Olson:

In his first post on G+ this afternoon, at 1:44pm local time, Ai Wei-wei said simply, “Greetings. I’m here!” He was quickly greeted with over 3,400 people adding him to their circles, and over 100 comments on his first G+ missive.

Less than an hour later, Mr Ai posted a self-portrait photo to prove its authenticity. The number of established Chinese bloggers who are following him also proves it’s his genuine profile.

Ai Wei-wei has sneaked some cheeky humour into the ‘About’ section of his new G+ profile, describing himself as a “suspected pornography enthusiast and tax evader” – a reference to two of the many police charges leveled at him recently.

Among Ai’s posts is a gallery of photographs from his decade in New York, from 1983 to 1993.

Meanwhile, Steven Millward at Penn Olson reports discontent among other Chinese users, following the suspension of a number of accounts for the use of pseudonyms.

As each day goes by, more Chinese users are getting deleted from G+ due to their usage of a nickname on the site. For some it’s a habit carried over from their Tencent QQ profiles, but for others it’s about having a degree of anonymity for safety’s sake, to be able to engage in debates on sensitive topics in a country where free speech on every subject is not possible.

Hundreds of Chinese users on Google Plus – a significant number of the total now on there – have been circulating a plea to Google on this issue, written in Chinese by someone called ‘NewsinChina Tweeter’ – see the full text here. Almost inevitably, that user got booted from G+ over the weekend. The text contains the entreaty (my own translation):

Please, Google+, on the issue of naming, be sure to consider the Chinese consumer’s behaviour, especially of users in mainland China. … Please do not force them into the real-name system. Otherwise I’d think that Google has been in violation of its own “Do no evil” principle.

For European and other western nationals, the various social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook and G+ itself, are just pure social tools. But for Chinese users, the significance of these social networking sites has never been just that kind of tool, but also a symbol of a kind of freedom of expression and resistance to undue scrutiny.

The controversy echoes similar cases on Facebook, including the suspension of activist and journalist Michael Anti’s (legal name: Zhao Jing) account. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin wrote an open letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concern at the potential consequences of this policy for users living under repressive regimes:

Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia have again highlighted the significant benefits and costs of social networking technology like Facebook to democracy and human rights activists. Facebook has facilitated efforts by activists to organize demonstrations and publicize human-rights abuses. At the same time, the Egyptian and Tunisian governments have reportedly used Facebook to monitor activists, which is surely aided by Facebook’s refusal to allow activists to use pseudonyms.

Google+’s User Content and Conduct Policy does appear more flexible than Facebook’s, permitting and even encouraging the use of established, real-world pseudonyms like Michael Anti’s:

13. Display Name

To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.

… when applying our policies, we may make exceptions based on artistic, educational, or documentary considerations, or when there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action.

Google Vice President Vic Gundotra assured Robert Scoble that the existing rules were a work in progress:

He says that he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn’t allow people who aren’t wearing shirts to enter.

He says it isn’t about real names. He says he isn’t using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like “god” or worse.

He says they have made some mistakes while doing the first pass at this and they are learning. He also says the team will change how they communicate with people. IE, let them know what they are doing wrong, etc ….

He also says they are working on ways to handle pseudonyms, but that will be a while before the team can turn on those features (everyone is working hard on a raft of different things and can’t just react overnight to community needs).

Another Google VP, Bradley Horowitz, later explained the first steps towards improvement. From CNET News:

First, people who violate the policy will no longer see their profiles automatically suspended and will instead receive a warning and be given a chance to adjust their name. Google has provided a Web page explaining how users can edit their profile names to follow the policy’s requirements. The company also promises to set better expectations as far as the next steps and timeframes for users who need to adjust their profile names.

Second, Google is aiming to improve the overall Google+ signup process to help people create profiles that won’t get them into trouble later on.

Third, Google is trying to placate people who’d like to display a nickname, maiden name, or other alternative name within their profiles. Though the actual profile name will still limit you to your real name, two workarounds will be offered …

Neither of these two workarounds—addition of nicknames in an “other names” section, and greater visibility of other identifying information—offers a solution to those for whom the use of a pseudonym is a matter of protective anonymity.

Dave Winer argues that talk of restaurants and shirts conceals Google’s real motives:

There’s a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it’s possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners, who might be banks, retailers, supermarkets, hospitals, airlines. To connect with your use of cell phones that might be running their mobile operating system. To provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.

Simply put, a real name is worth more than a fake one.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Egypt, Facebook, Google, Michael Anti, privacy, social networking, tunisia
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“Shanzhai mobile phones are not as popular as in the past. More and more people like 3G smart phones. Last year, I could sell at least 20 shanzhai mobile phones in one day, but now just 5 or 6, ” said Li, the shanzhai phone retailer.

“In the 2G era, users cared about functions. But now, no one talks about Bluetooth and cameras; consumers are fascinated by software applications, like Angry Birds and Facebook. Shanzhai mobile phones can’t support these applications well,” Li added ….

“The turnkey solution is not valid in the 3G era. Now the competition is in mobile phone operating systems (OS), between Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The three giants can call on a huge number of application developers for their OS to attract manufacturers and users. The whole industry has changed, and chipset manufacturers can’t dominate the industry anymore,” Guo said.

“Shanzhai phone manufacturers are very weak in research and development. In the 2G era, they relied on the turnkey solution.

“Their ‘research and development’ is only in designing the shell of the phones or combining provided mobile phone functions.”

See also: a 2009 New York Times report on the rise of shanzhai cellphones, and a sociologist’s story of smartphones’ potency as status symbols, via CDT. For background on the term “shanzhai” 山寨 (“mountain stronghold”), consult our Grass Mud Horse Lexicon.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cell phones, Facebook, iPhone, shanzhai
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“Now, in China, you have the “great firewall”, as it’s well known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many other overseas websites, and that’s done in part with the help from Western technology, but that’s only half of the story.

“The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet known as a system of self-discipline—in plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 companies which are best at exercising self-discipline, i.e. policing their content, and Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.”

See also the main page for TEDGlobal 2011.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, Baidu, Dalai Lama, Facebook, Google, Internet censorship, Internet Society of China, iPhone, Robin Li, self-censorship, Twitter
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