Daily Archives: March 11, 2020

China-based TikTok has been accused of censorship about as many times as Facebook has been accused of providing questionable privacy. To help build user trust, TikTok is opening a location where moderators can be observed in action. The TikTok Transparency Center, announced on March 11, will allow outside experts to see how content moderation at TikTok works.

The center, which will be part of TikToks Los Angeles office, invites experts to evaluate the social platforms Trust & Safety standards. TikTok says those experts will be invited to see how moderators apply those guidelines in real life, including by reviewing posts that the software has flagged and looking at posts that the technology didnt catch.

The center will also allow experts to see how users communicate concerns and how staff responds. TikTok says the center will help experts see how the content that remains on the platform and the content thats removed from the platform line up with the networks newly updated Community Guidelines.

We expect the Transparency Center to operate as a forum where observers will be able to provide meaningful feedback on our practices, TikTok general manager Vanessa Pappas wrote in a blog post. Our landscape and industry is rapidly evolving, and we are aware that our systems, policies, and practices are not flawless, which is why we are committed to constant improvement.

TikTok says that content moderation is only the initial focus for the center. A planned second phase will allow experts to observe work in data privacy, security, and source code.

The TikTok Transparency Center is slated to open in May, shortly after TikToks new chief information security officer, Roland Cloutier, starts working with the company.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China, where censorship laws are strict. TikTok is regularly accused of censoring different topics, from transgender users to Tiananmen Square. Others have accused the app of being spyware. The company paid a $5.7 million fine last year for violating the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act. Late last year, the U.S. government launched a national security investigation into the companys acquisition of Musical.ly due to a failure to obtain clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Meanwhile, TikToks short video format is continuing to grow last year, the platform was estimated to have 700 million new downloads.

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TikTok wants to prove its not censoring content by letting experts come watch - Yahoo Tech

2019 was a year of relative calm for the IDF Censor. According to official figures provided to +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Movement for Freedom of Information last month following a freedom of information act request, the censor barred the full publication of 202 stories in media outlets, and partially redacted another 1,973 stories.

Compared with figures that we have been gathering dating back to 2011, last year saw the least direct censorship of news outlets over the past decade.

All media outlets in Israel are required to submit articles relating to security and foreign relations to the IDF Censor for review prior to publication. The censor draws its authority from emergency regulations enacted following Israels founding, and which remain in place to this today.

These regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact an article, while barring media outlets from indicating in any way whether a story has been altered. However, while legal criteria defining the IDF Censors mandate are both strict and quite broad, the decision of which stories to submit for review remains in the hands of editors at media outlets.

The drop in intervention by the military censor in 2019 is even more apparent when compared to 2018, a peak year for censorship. That year saw 363 stories barred from publication (nearly one a day), while 2,712 more stories were partially redacted.

The shrinking of the scope of censorship was also accompanied by a drop in the number of materials filed by media outlets to the censor. In 2019, publications filed 8,127 stories for the censors review around 25 percent fewer than the year before which was itself a relatively low number.

Yet even in a weak year, this means that there are over 200 stories that journalists found newsworthy but could not make public, and more than 2,000 stories that faced some sort of external interference.

This is still a huge number, considering that no other country in the world that defines itself as a democracy imposes such an obligation on journalists to receive a government officials approval prior to publication. Since 2011, 2,863 stories have been scrapped by the censor and 21,683 stories have been redacted.

The military censor, of course, does not share information about the nature of the stories it conceals from the public, nor does it offer a monthly report of these activities. This makes it even more difficult to understand why there was such a drop in censorship last year.

In our report about 2018, we surmised that the spike in censorship may have been connected to Israeli air strikes in Syria and Lebanon. In 2019, however, Israeli politicians especially around the time of the elections in April and September openly bragged about taking such military actions. That public aspect could offer some form of explanation.

These figures which we are seeing year after year indicate a complex and problematic phenomenon, says Or Sadan, a lawyer with the Movement for Freedom of Information, who also heads the Clinic for Freedom of Information at The College of Management in Israel. The military censor literally prevents the public from being exposed to many pieces of information which media outlets have deemed worthy of reporting. The free press is the tool for the public to educate itself on developments in the country, including security-related matters.

In spite of security sensitivities, Sadan continued, the relevant bodies must keep the number of cases where information is withheld by the censor to a bare minimum, and only in extreme cases where there is an actual fear for national security. We will keep tracking these figures to learn about developments over the years.

Another aspect of the censors work is its operations in the Israeli national archives. Since the archives went fully online, and no longer have a physical library open to the public, the military censor has been reviewing all declassified materials, which has sometimes led it to hide files that had already been made public.

When the archives digitization began in 2016, the archival authorities submitted some 7,800 files for the censors review. In 2019, the number went down to 3,200. Unlike news pieces, the censor declined to inform us of how much archival material had been redacted, responding only that the vast majority of documents were approved for publication without alterations.

The military censors growing lack of transparency is itself a cause for concern. The censor is fully exempt from Israels Freedom of Information Act, and though it has essentially volunteered to answer +972s questions in recent years, its answers are getting shorter by the year.

In the first responses to our appeals in 2016, the censor released the number of archival documents that were redacted, and the number of cases in which the censor demanded that a media outlet remove information published without prior approval (an average of 250 cases a year). Despite repeated attempts, these figures have not been given to us in recent years. (You can read more about +972s policy vis--vis the censor here).

In the censors latest response, dated February 2020, we also did not receive any information about the number of books redacted by the censor a number that previously stood at several dozen a year.

The Chief Military Censor, Brigadier General Ariella Ben-Avraham, is stepping down from her position in the coming weeks, earlier than planned. According to several media reports, she will be joining the Israeli NSO Group a cyber company which produces spyware and has been associated with several dictatorships efforts to spy on journalists and human rights defenders.

During her first year on the job as chief censor, Ben-Avraham expanded her jurisdiction from mainstream media outlets to social media and independent outlets, including +972 Magazine, demanding they file stories with the censor for approval. Ben-Avraham also decided to stop answering our questions on the number of times the censor actively removed stories that had already been published.

This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

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IDF censor redacted two thousand news items in 2019 - +972 Magazine

People around the world are turning to an online dating app for coronavirus information from inside Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the mysterious respiratory illness that has ripped through hospitals and supply chains around the world.

The Chinese government's lack of transparency and top-down limiting of communication to the outside world has led to accusations of state-backed censorship of the virus's impact. In the past two months, several citizen journalists and medical professionals have been punished as a result of their attempts to warn the Chinese people and the global citizenry.

Now, people from Manhattan to Bangkok are utilizing a passport feature from the online dating app Tinder to gain access into the daily lives of Chinese citizens on the front lines of the outbreak.

[Click here for complete coronavirus coverage]

Tinder, one of the world's most widely-used dating apps, features an upgraded "Gold" membership, which allows users to move their phone's location to any spot in the world, including cities and areas in China that are known for their lack of ability to communicate with the outside world. Users from outside China are using the feature to ping into Chinese borders and get a better sense of what is really happening in cities that have been quarantined.

A United States-based Twitter account @drethelin announced he was setting his location to Wuhan in late January so he could "get the real scoop on what's going on." Another Twitter user, @philosophyhater, on Feb. 10, tweeted,"I just bought tinder gold and set my location to wuhan."

One person said their friend matched with a doctor, who told her that a couple hundred patients had recovered. The doctor, who used the name Laughing and whose profile picture featured him wearing a face mask, said he worked at Wuhan Union Hospital. He confirmed that young people who get the virus would likely only experience flu-like symptoms.

"Yes Tinder #LoveInTimeOfCorona," tweeted user @bon_plus. "So a friend shared this with me today, she made good use of her Tinder Gold and tried reaching out to people from Wuhan. Luckily, she was able to talk to a doctor based in Wuhan. PICS of their convo!"

Though the World Health Organization has said the coronavirus is not a sexually transmitted disease, the Centers for Disease Controls has warned that transmission of fluids is a leading cause for infection. To ward off the spread, Tinder has instituted a new warning that pops up on the app, instructing users to wash their hands, avoid touching their faces, and maintain social distance in public gatherings.

The coronavirus has killed more than 4,000 people worldwide and infected over 100,000.

See the article here:
'Love in time of' coronavirus: Tinder being used to circumnavigate possible Chinese censorship of outbreak - Washington Examiner

Paul Gardner, University of Glasgow

Chinas political leaders will be hoping that when concerns about the coronavirus eventually start to recede, memories about the states failings early on in the outbreak will also fade. They will be particularly keen for people to forget the anger many felt after the death from COVID-19 of Dr Li Wenliang, the doctor censured for trying to warn colleagues about the outbreak. After Dr Lis death, the phrase We want freedom of speech was even trending on Chinese social media for several hours before the posts were deleted.

Dr Li had told fellow medical professionals about the new virus in a chat group on 30 December. He was accused of rumour-mongering and officials either ignored or played down the risks well into January. If officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, Dr Li told the New York Times, I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.

I am currently researching the Chinese party-states efforts to increase legitimacy by controlling the information that reaches its citizens. The lack of openness and transparency in this crucial early phase of the outbreak was partly because officials were gathering for annual meetings of the local Communist Party-run legislatures, when propaganda departments instruct the media not to cover negative stories.

However, the censorship in this period also reflects increasingly tight control over information in China. As Chinese media expert Anne-Marie Brady notes, from the beginning of his presidency, Xi Jinping was clear the media should focus on positive news stories that uphold unity and stability and are encouraging.

The deterioration in the medias limited freedoms under Xi Jinping was underlined by a visit he made to media organisations in 2016, declaring that, All Party media have the surname Party, and demanding loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

There have been a series of good quality investigative reports, notably by the business publication Caixin, since the authorities fully acknowledged the virus. As political scientist Maria Repnikova argues, providing temporary space for the media to report more freely can help the party-state project an image of managed transparency. However, the clampdown has undoubtedly had a significant effect on the medias ability to provide effective investigative reporting, particularly early on in the outbreak.

Online, there have been a succession of measures to limit speech the party deems a threat. These include laws that mean the threat of jail for anyone found guilty of spreading rumours. In an authoritarian regime, stopping rumours limits peoples ability to raise concerns and potentially discover the truth. A point made only too clearly by Dr Lis case.

The party focuses its censorship on problems that might undermine its legitimacy. Part of my ongoing research into information control in China involves an analysis of leaked censorship instructions collected by the US-based China Digital Times. This shows that between 2013 and 2018, over 100 leaked instructions concerned problems about the environment, food safety, health, education, natural disasters and major accidents. The actual number is likely to far exceed this.

For example, after an explosion at a petrochemical factory, media organisations were told to censor negative commentary related to petrochemical projects. And after parents protested about tainted vaccines, the media were instructed that only information provided by official sources could be used on front pages.

State media play a key role in the CCPs efforts to set the agenda online. My research shows that the number of stories featuring problems about the environment and disasters posted by Peoples Daily newspaper on Sina Weibo (Chinas equivalent of Twitter) fell significantly between 2013 and 2018.

Around 4.5% of all People Dailys Weibo posts between 2013 and 2015 were about the environment, but by 2018 had fallen to as low as 1%. Similarly, around 8%-10% of all posts by the newspaper were about disasters and major accidents between 2013 and 2015, but this figure fell to below 4% in the following three years.

The party wants people to focus instead on topics it thinks will enhance its legitimacy. The number of posts by Peoples Daily focusing on nationalism had doubled to 12% of the total by 2018.

As well as investigative reports on the outbreak in parts of the media, some Chinese individuals have also gone to great lengths to communicate information about the virus and conditions in Wuhan. However, the authorities have been steadily silencing significant critical voices and stepping up their efforts to censor other content they deem particularly unhelpful.

The censors do not stop everything, but as the China scholar Margaret E. Roberts suggests, porous censorship can still be very effective. She points out that the Chinese authorities efforts to make it more difficult for people to access critical content that does make it online, while flooding the internet with information the CCP wants them to see, can still be very effective.

When a problem cannot be avoided, my research shows that the propaganda authorities try to control the narrative by ensuring the media focus on the states efforts to tackle the problem. After a landslide at a mine in Tibet, the media were told to cover disaster relief promptly and abundantly. Coverage of such disasters by Peoples Daily focuses on images of heroic rescue workers.

This same propaganda effort is in evidence now. As the China Media Projects David Bandurski notes, media coverage in China is increasingly seeking to portray the Chinese Communist Party as the enabler of miraculous human feats battling the virus.

After Dr Lis death, CCP leaders sought to blame local officials for admonishing him. However, the actions taken against Dr Li were fully consistent with the Partys approach to controlling information under Xi Jinping.

It is impossible to know how many people have died, or might die in future, because people have decided to self-censor, rather than risk punishment for spreading rumours, or because the authorities have sought to avoid information reaching the public. The coronavirus outbreak highlights the risks of a system that puts social stability and ruling party legitimacy above the public interest.

Paul Gardner, PhD Candidate in Chinese Studies and Political Communication, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Censorship and Propaganda in the Time of the Coronavirus - Qrius