Every quarter, Econsultancy delivers an update on the major internet players in China and their user experience.
Subscribers can download the full China Digital Report, but I’ve had a skirt through and picked out some interesting bits you may or may not know about digital in China.
What do censorship and surveillance programmes look for? What can this tell us about internet usage in China?
Can we contrast with the perceived surveillance state of the West? What are the implications for a company in the Chinese market?
Unsurprisingly, there are lots of questions still to be answered about the state of the internet in China.
First Monday has this month published a very interesting paper, presenting an analysis of data from a year and a half tracking the censorship and surveillance keyword lists of two instant messaging (IM) programs used in China.
I thought it would be useful to sum up what Crandall et al. found, so you don’t have to read the whole thing. Although this study looks at IM clients, there are certainly findings that can be extrapolated across public services, such as Baidu and Sina Weibo.
Twitter has introduced country-specific censorship of tweets.
Walking a fine line in terms of freedom of expression, the company says it will introduce the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available to the rest world.
The recent media obsession over superinjunctions could lead to the unthinkable: censorship of web content here in the UK.