the problems that they themselves have helped to create.
We Don’t Censor; We Outsource!
Another reason why so much of today’s Internet censorship is invisible is because it’s not the governments who practice it. While in most cases it’s enough to block access to a particular critical blog post, it’s even better to remove that blog post from the Internet in its entirety. While governments do not have such mighty power, companies that enable users to publish such blog posts on their sites can do it in a blink. Being able to force companies to police the Web according to a set of some broad guidelines is a dream come true for any government. It’s the companies who incur all the costs, it’s the companies who do the dirty work, and it’s the companies who eventually get blamed by the users. Companies also are more likely to catch unruly content, as they know their online communities better than government censors. Finally, no individual can tell companies how to run those communities, so most appeals to freedom of expression are pointless.
Not surprisingly, this is the direction in which Chinese censorship is evolving. According to research done by Rebecca MacKinnon, who studies the Chinese Internet at New America Foundation and is a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, censorship of Chinese user-generated content is “highly decentralized,” while its “implementation is left to the Web companies themselves.”
To prove this, in mid-2008 she set up anonymous accounts on a dozen Chinese blog platforms and published more than a hundred posts on controversial subjects, from corruption to AIDS to Tibet, to each of them. MacKinnon’s objective was to test if and how soon they would be deleted. Responses differed widely across companies: The most vigilant ones deleted roughly half of all posts, while the least vigilant company censored only one. There was little coherence to the companies’ behavior, but then this is what happens when governments say “censor” but don’t spell out what it is that needs to be censored, leaving it for the scared executives to figure out. The more leeway companies have in interpreting the rules, the more uncertainty there is as to whether a certain blog post will be removed or allowed to stay. This Kafkaesque uncertainty can eventually cause more harm than censorship itself, for it’s hard to plan an activist campaign if you cannot be sure that your content will remain available.
This also suggests that, as bad as Google and Facebook may look to us, they still probably undercensor compared to most companies operating in authoritarian countries. Global companies are usually unhappy to take on a censorship role, for it might cost them dearly. Nor are they happy to face a barrage of accusations of censorship in their own home countries. (Local companies, on the other hand, couldn’t care less: Social networking sites in Azerbaijan probably have no business in the United States or Western Europe, nor are their names likely to be mispronounced at congressional hearings.)
But this is one battle that the West is already losing. Users usually prefer local rather than global services; those are usually faster, more relevant, easier to use, and in line with local cultural norms. Look at the Internet market in most authoritarian states, and you’ll probably find at least five local alternatives to each prominent Web 2.0 start-up from Silicon Valley. For a total online population of more than 300 million, Facebook’s 14,000 Chinese users, by one 2009 count, are just a drop in the sea (or, to be exact, 0.00046 percent).
Companies, however, are not the only intermediaries that could be pressured into deleting unwanted content. RuNet (the colloquial name for the Russian-speaking Internet), for example, heavily relies on “communities,” which are somewhat akin to Facebook groups, and those are run by dedicated moderators. Most of the socially relevant online activism in Russia happens on just one platform, LiveJournal. When in 2008 the online community of automobile lovers on LiveJournal became the place to share photos and reports from a wave of unexpected protests organized by unhappy drivers in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, its administrators immediately received requests from FSB, KGB’s successor, urging them to delete the reports. They complied, although they complained about the matter in a subsequent report that they posted to the community’s webpage (within just a few hours that post disappeared as well). Formally, though, nothing has been blocked; this is the kind of invisible censorship that is most difficult to fight.
The more intermediaries—whether human or corporate—are involved