The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [54]
As anti-U.S. riots began to break out in the streets, China’s largest newspaper, the People’s Daily, created an online chat forum called the Anti-Bombing Forum. Already, in 1999, chat forums were huge in China—much larger than they’ve ever been in the United States. As New York Times journalist Tom Downey explained a few years later, “News sites and individual blogs aren’t nearly as influential in China, and social networking hasn’t really taken off. What remain most vital are the largely anonymous online forums ... that are much more participatory, dynamic, populist and perhaps even democratic than anything on the English-language Internet.” Tech writer Clive Thompson quotes Shanthi Kalathil, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment, who says that the Anti-Bombing Forum helped to legitimize the Chinese government’s position that the bombing was deliberate among “an elite, wired section of the population.” The forum was a form of crowd-sourced propaganda: Rather than just telling Chinese citizens what to think, it lifted the voices of thousands of patriots aligned with the state.
Most of the Western reporting on Chinese information management focuses on censorship: Google’s choice to remove, temporarily, search results for “Tiananmen Square,” or Microsoft’s decision to ban the word “democracy” from Chinese blog posts, or the Great Firewall that sits between China and the outside world and sifts through every packet of information that enters or exits the country. Censorship in China is real: There are plenty of words that have been more or less stricken from the public discourse. When Thompson asks whether the popular Alibaba engine would show results for dissident movements, CEO Jack Ma shook his head. “No! We are a business!” he said. “Shareholders want to make money. Shareholders want us to make the customer happy. Meanwhile we do not have any responsibilities saying we should do this or that political thing.”
In practice, the firewall is not so hard to circumvent. Corporate virtual private networks—Internet connections encrypted to prevent espionage—operate with impunity. Proxies and firewall workarounds like Tor connect in-country Chinese dissidents with even the most hard-core antigovernment Web sites. But to focus exclusively on the firewall’s inability to perfectly block information is to miss the point. China’s objective isn’t so much to blot out unsavory information as to alter the physics around it—to create friction for problematic information and to route public attention to progovernment forums. While it can’t block all of the people from all of the news all of the time, it doesn’t need to.
“What the government cares about,” Atlantic journalist James Fallows writes, “is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.” The strategy, says Xiao Qiang of the University of California at Berkeley, is “about social control, human surveillance, peer pressure, and self-censorship.” Because there’s no official list of blocked keywords or forbidden topics published by the government, businesses and individuals censor themselves to avoid a visit from the police. Which sites are available changes daily. And while some bloggers suggest that the system’s unreliability is a result of faulty technology (“the Internet will override attempts to control it!”), for the government this is a feature, not a bug. James Mulvenon, the head of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, puts it this way: “There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.”
Lest that sensation be too subtle, the Public Security Bureau in Shenzhen, China, developed a more direct approach: Jingjing and Chacha, the cartoon Internet