A Former “Content Reviewer”: I Once Worked for the CCP’s Ministry of Truth
We all know that the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, has built up a “Great Firewall” to block all overseas websites and information that they don’t like. The so-called “Internet” in China should actually be called “Intranet”.
But how about information that is published inside China on China’s own websites, but is disliked by the party? We know roughly that the CCP also censors information inside China, but exactly how, and to what extent?
Recently we had a rare opportunity to gain a little bit of insight into how the CCP’s tremendous information censorship works, through detailed first-hand accounts from a former so-called “Content Reviewer” of the largest Chinese-language mobile portal. You will be amazed to find that the “Internet Management” Department is much bigger, much more powerful, and much more sophisticated than the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s 1984. And you might also wonder, how can something more ridiculous than Orwell’s 1984 really exist in the real world? Today, I will unmask the CCP’s “Ministry of Truth” for you.
The Everyday Schedule of a “Content Reviewer”
Liu Lipeng is a former “Content Reviewer” of Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website. It’s a Twitter-like social network, the largest Chinese-language mobile portal, and has more than 500 million users and millions of posts per day.
Liu Lipeng worked for 10 years at Sina Weibo, before he escaped China and came to the US in March this year with his family. In his recent interviews with the Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty Television, and Voice of America, he gave us a rare and gloomy picture of how the CCP’s “Ministry of Truth” operates.
Liu Lipeng joined Sina Weibo in 2011. The department he belonged to was located in Tianjin and had the nickname “The Department of Deletion”, which means that they were mainly responsible for deleting posts on Weibo.
It took him one hour to get to his company in the Industrial Zone of Tianjin. He always slept on the bus, as what awaited him was another long and very busy day of work.
At that time there were about 120 “Content Reviewers” at Sina Weibo’s department in Tianjin. They were divided into 4 groups and worked on a two-shift schedule system. The day time shift worked for 11 hours, and the night shift needed to work for 13 hours to ensure that there were Content Reviewers working at every minute, day and night to monitor everything.
Li Lipeng said, everyday people working the two different shifts needed to have a handing-over meeting to make sure everything was covered.
After the meeting, everyone returned to his or her station, turned on the computer, and opened the backend of the system. Each computer was exactly the same. When Liu Lipeng recalled the scene at work many years afterwards, he could still feel some of the horror: "Everyone was in a cubicle, there was no other sound in the room, only the noise of the rolling mouses could be heard. From time to time, there would be a stop for a few seconds, then you could hear the clicks of the mouse. That was someone deleting something.”
Sensitive Word Database
When Li Lipeng and other “Content Reviewers” turned on their computers, the system had already screened everything with its “sensitive word database”. Posts containing highly sensitive words such as the Tiananmen Massacre and Falun Gong, would be deleted automatically. For posts containing moderate or slightly sensitive words, there were two ways of dealing with them: either manually checking them before or after publishing.
Liu Lipeng said: "Conducting text censorship is fairly fast: Enter keywords in the backend, delete some harmful information, and then it's either to delete, make private, stop somebody from making more posts, hide the post, or let it pass through. Choose one of these several operations. There are also many news organizations that need ‘customized’ censorship, which means filtering content in the comment section to only allow comments of the CCP’s 50 cent army and the ‘patriots’ to display.”
The Criterion Is That There Is No Criterion
Then what are the rules, or criteria for content censorship? How do the “Content Reviewers” decide what to delete and what to keep?
Liu Lipeng said, "The criterion is that there is no criterion. If there is one, wouldn’t everybody know how to bypass it so they won’t get censored?
“Chinese censorship standards are opaque, they're black boxes. You can't talk about Chinese censorship so that people won’t know the rules. “However, each company has its own internal standards for enforcement, which is something that is strictly forbidden to communicate to the outside."
Liu Lipeng said, the sensitive database is built up gradually, through gathering unfound words in the comments of some “sensitive users”.
Some data was given to them by the CCP’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, and the Public Security Ministry. Sometimes even the military would give them a keyword sample and ask them to delete all posts containing those words from the entirety of cyberspace.
Liu Lipeng said, “We could get 10 samples today, and 50 samples tomorrow. We abstracted many sensitive words and added them to our database.”
And the sensitive words kept growing. Now there are hundreds of thousands of “sensitive words” from some platforms. Liu Lipeng’s censorship logs kept growing too.
Liu had kept all the censorship logs from day one. And the logs kept getting thicker and thicker.
Changing the Record of Past Events According to Current Needs
Liu Lipeng said, although the system would do the first round of content reviewing, manually reviewing was always the final step and a must.
Once they received 350 K sensitive words from the State Council Information Office; and all these sensitive words were related to Xi Jinping. They were required to do a manual review of everything that had already been reviewed based on the new sensitive word database.
And the database kept changing too. Sometimes, when one CCP official was ousted, they needed to re-screen all previous posts about him. That is why some very old posts would suddenly get deleted.
Does this sound familiar? Yes, I am sure you also think about Orwell’s 1984. The biggest task of the Ministry of Truth was also to change the record of past events according to current needs.
“Relevant Department”
Liu Lipeng said, the orders to re-screen content manually came from many departments. They received all sorts of orders everyday, giving them detailed instructions as to what to delete, what to let pass, how to steer the direction of public opinion, etc. Sometimes even the Ministry of Agriculture would give them orders. It seemed that everybody had the right to tell them what to delete, what to ban, and whose accounts to suspend.
A former Tencent staff member who did not want to be named told Voice of America that Tencent's censorship process is pretty much the same. He said that there is a special security center responsible for content review.
First of all, there is a list of keywords. If an article contains several keywords, sometimes the system will directly decide not to publish the article. Sometimes it will decide that this article needs a manual review.
Sometimes, even if an article has been permitted by both the system and manual review, if a “relevant department” feels unhappy, it will ask Tencent to delete that article too.
The former Tencent staff said that during his time there, every day he would receive something called a “reporting reminder”. Sometimes there were more than a dozen items in it, sometimes there were 3-4 items. They were all orders from the Internet Management Office.
However, it's not just the Internet Management Office that can give orders to them.
He said: "There are more than 50 departments that have the power to censor the Internet in China, including the Ministry of Public Security, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the Ministry of Education, the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Patriotic Movement Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Technology Information, and so on. These departments can all control the content of the Internet. It is a three-dimensional system of power, not simply a point to point system from the Internet Management Office to the Internet platform."
And who are the mysterious “relevant departments”?
Liu Lipeng said, "Let me give you an example, for example, if there is a movie and a school appears in the movie, it has to be sent to the Ministry of Education for review; if there are two policemen in the movie, it has to be sent to the Ministry of Public Security for review; if there is a miner, it has to be sent to the Ministry of Land and Resources for review. In short, you have to send the relevant content to the relevant department for review. This is the so-called ‘relevant department’. This kind of censorship is very specific and very absurd."
A Log from the “Content Reviewer”
And what exactly did they censor? Let’s see part of Liu Lipeng’s work log on June 5, 2014.
Part of Liu Lipeng’s work log on June 5, 2014.(Credit: VOA)
The log says,
“For the reasons to block a user, the system currently only provides four major categories: ‘Politics’, ‘Special Event’, ‘Illegal Information’, and ‘Command from Monitoring System’. We need to develop sub-categories for these major ones in the future.
“At present, the criteria for selections are:
Politics: Negative information regarding the leaders, politics and current affairs related information.
Ilegal Information: information related to guns, explosion and pornography, etc.
Special Event: June the 4th Event (which refers to Tiananmen Massacre), Falun Gong, events related to special groups.
Orders from the Government: orders from the Internet Management Office, Internet Monitoring System and Government, notifications from the system that require this account to be closed.
“It needs to be stressed that you need to be absolutely satisfied that everything works well before you turn on the automatic hide or stop function. If you cannot control it, or you don’t understand, you need to continue to hide or stop posts manually. Don’t carelessly let them go through.”
Then there is a table containing the following items for a blocked user:
User ID, nickname, statue, time of blocking, when the blocking expires, reason for blocking, operator of the blocking.
So in this table, we can see that a user whose ID was 3224373155, whose nickname was “A Bar on Road 504” was blocked at 15:19 on 1/17/2013, with no time of expiration. The reason for blocking him or her was that this account was a “reincarnation” of a previous account called “zeSrwECbn”, and the blocking was done by “fanzeng”.
By the way, Chinese netizens often open up another account after their previous account is blocked. They call this a “reincarnation”. It’s a very common practice in China. Some people have multiple generations of “reincarnated” accounts as their accounts keep getting deleted.
The work log goes on to say: “Apart from filling in the article number, please also write down the reason when you block or limit a user. When there is an important event and many users need to be banned, whoever is in charge should create a consistent format. For example, in the Southern Weekly incident, when filling in the reason for banning or blocking a user, you should use ‘Southern Weekly’ as a mark. Otherwise, it is impossible to conduct a search for it in the future. Please pay attention to this. Please implement this as a long term request.”
By the way, the Southern Weekly incident mentioned here refers to a well known incident in China in 2013. It was a conflict which arose over government censorship of a "New Year's Greeting" published in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly. Guangdong Province's Propaganda Department changed the headline and content of the New Year's message without first informing Southern Weekly editors.
In protest, newsroom staff posted online criticism for lack of free expression in China and went on a four-day strike.
The incident also sparked public demonstrations against press censorship which took place outside Southern Weekly's headquarters in Guangzhou, China.
As a result of the incident and the accompanying demonstrations, keywords such as "Southern Weekly," "January 7 protest," and "open letter" have become sensitive topics blocked by the Chinese firewall.
Let’s go back to the work log of Liu Liping.
Underneath the above paragraph are two items recorded by the day time shift on June 5th.
This first item recorded at 8:56:47 goes like this:
“Lianhe Zaobao: The video of Kong Qindong talking about the June 4th Incident. It is a test of the government regarding the re-evaluation of the June 4th Incident. The relevant content should be kept private. “
The second item recorded at 9:55:54 goes like this:
“Urumqi Procuratorate: Terrorism Cases Will Be Tried and Concluded on the Same Day of Acceptance, or No Later than 48 Hours. Please pay attention to the relevant discussion, and deal with content that attacks our party and government using this article as an excuse.”
These two items had very specific instructions on how to deal with comments on two specific articles that day.
From this we can see how carefully everything is controlled on the Internet. For almost every report or article, there are some guidelines regarding how to steer or “display” the public opinion. The so-called “harmful content” has no chance to survive, so that what people can see is all what the CCP wants them to see.
From 120 to 10,000
Liu Lipeng said, the internet censorship is getting worse and worse. When he worked at Sina Weibo in 2011, the company had about 120 content reviewers. Today, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance alone has over 10,000 content reviewers. Well, how does all this sound to you? When you read George Orwell's 1984, did you ever expect that something far worse would really exist in the real world, together with you? How can this kind of thing actually be allowed to happen in our world? Perhaps it’s time for us to ask these questions, and think hard about how we can end this kind of absurdity once and for all.
That’s all for today. Thank you for watching. One viewer said I desperately need more audience. So please subscribe to my channel, make sure you turn on the “notification” bell and share my channel with your family and friends.
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9/14/2020
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