A new report by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) explores the growing demand for human-powered censorship in China. While the Party-state under Xi Jinping has increasingly restricted political expression, expanded its censorship...
As the U.S. Supreme Court voted to uphold a law forcing either the sale or ban of ByteDance-owned TikTok, “TikTok refugees” continued flocking to the Chinese-language app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. The influx of new...
Pending a Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. government’s crackdown on TikTok might end the app’s availability in U.S. app stores this weekend. The looming ban has prompted American users to seek a new home in another Chinese app,...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China Journalism Award, some Chinese investigative journalists continue to ply their trade with dogged reporting, commitment to keeping the...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang newsletter, detailing the work and attitudes of some of China’s legions of low-paid, overworked online content reviewers....
In a remarkable interview, a censor for one of China’s biggest search engines described what gets deleted from the Chinese internet and how—as well as their perspective on the morality of their work. The interview was...
Amid state-media silence and Chinese Foreign Ministry insistence that two fatal anti-Japanese attacks in Shenzhen and Suzhou were “isolated incidents” that could happen in any country, Chinese bloggers, citizen journalists, and...
In China, the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was met with all-out digital censorship that quashed overt online mourning. In Hong Kong, efforts to publicly commemorate “June Fourth” were ruthlessly suppressed by...
The following themes, and the six covered in part two, are not the “most censored” words of 2023 but rather a retrospective of topics that the Party-state deemed unfit for Chinese eyes, selected by our Chinese team. While some...
Toys riffing on China’s hottest online idiom, “calling a rat a duck,” were yanked from online shelves this past week, a sign of the idiom’s continued political sensitivity. The tongue-in-cheek saying “calling a rat a duck”...
Today, Weibo censors deleted a photograph of a flowchart demonstrating how security software giant Qihoo 360 censors its generative artificial intelligence (AI) product. During a June 13 launch event for Qihoo 360’s latest large...
At times, parsing propaganda for deeper meaning is difficult. At others, the (unintentional) message is hidden in plain sight. In October 2018, one bus passenger in Guizhou’s Nayong County realized that a roadside billboard...
The new word “humineral” (人矿 rén kuàng) has taken the Chinese internet by storm and is now a sensitive word subject to censorship. First introduced in a now-censored Zhihu post on January 2, 2023, “humineral”—a portmanteau of 人...
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. Cyberspace Administration of China 6:11 P.M., November 29, 2022 Notification: Thorough Clean-up and...
CDT Chinese has recently archived and republished four essays, censored in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that reveal the topics that Chinese authorities perceive to be sensitive. Two of the essays deal with the...
“20021” may look like a random string of numbers or a mangled date, but many Weibo users know it as a sign that they are being blocked from posting “sensitive” content. Telegram user @cybergraveyardcn (简中赛博坟场)...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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