#CHINA 900B WECHAT 259BSTREETJOURNAL PROFESSIONAL#

For the millions of members of ChinaвЂ™s diaspora, it is the bridge that links them to the trappings of home, from family chatter to food photos. Built to be everything for everyone, WeChat is indispensable.ДЇor most Chinese people in China, WeChat is a sort of all-in-one app: a way to swap stories, talk to old classmates, pay bills, coordinate with co-workers, post envy-inducing vacation photos, buy stuff and get news. Li had little choice but to take the bad with the good. ThatвЂ™s where real-time automated censorship comes in.Ms. So now theyвЂ™re trying to employ new methods to catch so-called вЂharmful contentвЂ™ that the Chinese Communist Party wants to stop. YouвЂ™ve seen Tencent and WeChat, in particular, get hit with fines. вЂњThereвЂ™s less official tolerance for conversation, expression, and networking that had been tolerated previously. вЂњIn the last few years, youвЂ™ve had the combination of tightening censorship restrictions and tightening controls,вЂќ Cook says. Researchers found that dozens of images relating to the alleged theft of the documents were censored. One event triggered even more censored images: in December 2018, a scandal erupted when the Chinese Supreme Court admitted the disappearance of documents in a billion-dollar dispute between mining companies. So did a host of other issues, like conflict with the US and domestic corruption or other problems. Researchers found that newsworthy events like the arrest of a Huawei executive on charges of fraud and the CRISPR-baby scandal in which a Chinese scientist announced the birth of girls with edited genomes triggered waves of censorship. In addition to deadly historical events like the Tiananmen Square protests and the Cultural Revolution, new events are quickly added. Under the direction of Beijing, TencentвЂ™s censors are adroitly responsive to current affairs. вЂњItвЂ™s really hard to function in modern Chinese society without using WeChat, and so the chilling effect is real.вЂќ вЂњThis has really become a mega-app,вЂќ says Sarah Cook, the senior research analyst for East Asia at the pro-democracy research group Freedom House.

#CHINA 900B WECHAT 259BSTREETJOURNAL PROFESSIONAL#

You can book doctorвЂ™s appointments, pay utility bills, talk to professional contacts, or engage government services. The app combines the features of Facebook, Uber, GrubHub, and more. WeChat is so pervasive in China that the prospect of getting suspended or banned can disrupt lives. Inside of China, it is part of the larger trend under Xi Jinping of tightening controls on the Chinese internet and society more broadly.вЂќ вЂњThe Chinese firms are all responsible for content, and while they have relied on tens of thousands of human censors, they have also been developing new approaches to content take-downs. The Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns WeChat, is under вЂњa great deal of pressureвЂќ from Beijing to implement effective censorship tech, says Adam Segal, the director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. The latter systems are also used on WeChatвЂ™s Moments to check and build the companyвЂ™s dynamic blacklist. ItвЂ™s a self-reinforcing system thatвЂ™s growing with every image sent. So-called harmful content-including anything about international or domestic politics deemed undesirable by the Chinese Communist Party-will be sniffed out, removed from the conversation, and then added to that original hash index, which flags it for instant censorship from that moment onward.

The image is then checked for visual similarity to other censored images. Using optical character recognition, the image is examined for text (sending screen shots of newspaper articles was once an easy way past censors). If the image isnвЂ™t instantly censored, itвЂ™s sent for automatic analysis.

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