[1] King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. “Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation.” Science 345.6199 (2014): 1251722.
[2] Hiruncharoenvate, Chaya, Zhiyuan Lin, and Eric Gilbert. “Algorithmically Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo with Nondeterministic Homophone Substitutions.” ICWSM. 2015.
Summaries:
In the first paper, King et al. conducted an experiment on censorship in China by creating their own social media websites. They submitted different posts on their social media websites and observed how these were reviewed. The goal of their study was to reverse engineer the censorship process. The results of their study show that the posts that invoke collective actions like protests are censored, whereas, the posts containing criticism of the state and its leaders are published.
In the second paper, Hiruncharoenvate et al. performed experiments to manipulate the keyword based censoring algorithms. They make use of homophones of censored words to get past automated reviews. The authors collected the censored Weibos and developed an algorithm that generates homophones for the censored keywords. The results of their experiments show that that posts with homophones tend to stay 3 times longer and that the native Chinese speakers do not face any trouble deciphering the homophones.
Reflections:
Both these papers use deception to manipulate the “The Great Firewall of China”. The first paper felt like a plot of a movie, where a secret agent invades another country to “rescue” its citizens from a so-called tyrant oppressor. According to me, the research conducted in both of these papers are ethically wrong on so many levels. There is a fine line between illegal and unethical and I think that these papers might have crossed that line. Creating a secret network and providing ways to manipulate the infrastructure created by a government for only its own people is wrong in my opinion. How is it different from the Russian hackers using Facebook to manipulate the election results? Except for the fact that these research papers are in the name of “Free Speech” or “Research”. Had Russians written a research paper “Large-scale experiment on how social media can be used to change users opinions or manipulate elections”, would that justify what they did? NO.
Moving further, one question that I had while reading the first paper was, if they already had access to the software, then, why did they create a social network to see which posts are blocked when the same software was used to block the posts in those social networks in the first place? Or did I understand it wrongly? Secondly, being unfamiliar with the Chinese language, the use homophones in second paper is interesting, and since we have both Chinese speakers presenting tomorrow, it would be nice to know if all the words in Chinese have homophones. Also, is it only in Mandarin or in all Chinese languages? I believe we cannot replicate this research in any other popular language like English or Spanish.
Furthermore, in the second paper, the main idea behind the use of homophones is to deceive the algorithms. The authors claim that the algorithms get deceived due to a different word but the native speakers were able to get the true meaning by looking at the context of the sentence. This makes me wonder that with the new deep learning techniques it is possible to know the context of a sentence and therefore, will this research still work? Secondly, after some time the Chinese government will know that people are using homophones and therefore, feeding homophones to algorithms should not be too difficult.
Finally, it was interesting to see in the first paper that the posts that invoke collective actions like protests are censored, whereas, the posts containing criticism of the state and its leaders are published. So, essentially, the Chinese government is not against criticism but protests. Now, the question of ethics for the other side, is it ethical for governments to block posts? And, how is what the Chinese government doing is different from when other governments crack down on their protestors? Allowing protests and then cracking down on them seems even worse than disallowing protests at all.
