{"id":76,"date":"2013-06-04T17:02:25","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T21:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/?p=76"},"modified":"2013-07-17T10:41:11","modified_gmt":"2013-07-17T14:41:11","slug":"tiananmen-square-anniversary-china-experiments-with-subtle-censorship-and-netizens-fight-back-with-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/2013\/06\/04\/tiananmen-square-anniversary-china-experiments-with-subtle-censorship-and-netizens-fight-back-with-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiananmen Square Anniversary: China Experiments with Subtle Censorship and Netizens Fight Back with Images"},"content":{"rendered":"

To ensure its country\u2019s Internet remains in good working order, the Chinese government has used June 4 as an unofficial “Internet maintenance” day. In 2009, more than 300 sites went down<\/a>. In 2010, a slew of blocked sites (many pornographic) became accessible<\/a>. Last year, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index dropped 64.89 points, leading the popular Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo to ban searches<\/a> of related terms. Why such erratic behavior? June 4 also marks the day when, in 1989, tanks entered Tiananmen Square to violently quash pro-democracy protests.<\/p>\n

Days before this year\u2019s 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Weibo experimented with a much subtler form of censorship<\/a>, but Chinese netizens used creative images<\/a> to signal their acknowledgement of what Chinese government wishes the country would forget.<\/p>\n

Typically, users who search for sensitive terms such as \u201cJune 4th incident\u201d receive the message, \u201cAccording to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for [keyword] cannot be displayed.\u201d Beginning on May 31, searches for \u201cTiananmen incident,\u201d \u201c24th anniversary,\u201d \u201cJune 4th,\u201d \u201c64 incident\u201d returned a sanitized list, for example, referencing a 1976 protest that occurred in Tiananmen Square, or a seemingly innocuous message that the search yielded no results, according to analysis<\/a> from the Chinese Internet transparency organization GreatFire.org.<\/p>\n

By the evening of June 3, Weibo reverted<\/a> to displaying its original censorship announcement in response to searches of sensitive terms. Citizen Lab posted a list<\/a> of 71 terms blocked on Weibo, many variations on the numbers six, four, and 1989. China Digital Times mentioned additional terms<\/a> including names of people and places.<\/p>\n

The seemingly benign terms \u201ctoday,\u201d \u201ctonight,\u201d \u201cbig yellow duck,\u201d<\/a> and \u201cblack shirt\u201d<\/a> also faced restriction on Weibo. The latter two reference an online meme and calls for Chinese to wear black shirts to observe the anniversary.<\/p>\n

While Weibo\u2019s text filters grow ever more sophisticated, the network seems less able to police images. Chinese netizens exploited this fact<\/a>, posting variations of the iconic \u201cTank Man\u201d image. One replaced the tanks with yellow rubber ducks (hence the blockage of \u201cbig yellow duck\u201d); one showed a cow in front of a line of bulldozers; another showed a praying mantis pushing against a wheel, referencing a popular idiom about the futility of trying to stop the future.<\/p>\n

On May 31, the Chinese government also cut off access<\/a> to the encrypted (https) version of Wikipedia, which Chinese Internet users could use to see articles banned on the unencrypted (http) version.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year marks the 24th anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre. In what has become an “Internet maintenance” ritual, the popular microblogging site Weibo blocked terms relating to the event but could not keep up with the memes netizens circulated to memorialize the event. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[359,53303],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-memes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4L9BV-1e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5507"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}