Why would I ever need that?

Our discussion this week with David Eaves on open government, government-directed censorship, and different governments’ views of local and global stability gave me the perfect excuse to catch up on a bit of reading that I’ve had sitting on my desk for quite some time now. In particular, I read two papers by Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. The first paper is titled How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression (2013), and the second is titled How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument (2017). They are a fascinating read, showing how data collected from the Internet in China can provide a clear indication of what the Chinese government is trying to accomplish. The data collected not only informs, but it overturns long-held theories about the activities and goals of the Chinese government. If you’re interested in government and the Internet, I highly recommend these papers.

In the section titled “Types of Censorship” on page 3 of the 2013 paper, the authors describe the three known ways that China’s regime censors free speech and human expression: (1) the Great Firewall of China, which blocks entire websites in China; (2) keyword blocking, which prevents social media containing prohibited words and phrases from ever being posted; and (3) hand censoring of the social media posts that slip through the first two mechanisms. The first paper takes advantage of this last manual operation to create a dataset using an automated system that collects a huge number of social media posts and then monitors and analyzes the government’s actions toward certain posts. As my title hints, I find this use of the Internet and automated technology – technology that we discussed in class being used by governments (or corporations) to watch individuals – to watch a secretive government an intriguing turnabout.

If you think about it, this is a very different tack on open government using the Internet. If the government is going to use the Internet to monitor and influence our individual actions, the same openness of the Internet can be used to monitor and understand the actions of a secretive (or supposedly open) government. The 2013 paper says this explicitly: “In this article, we show that this program, designed to limit freedom of speech of the Chinese people, paradoxically also exposes an extraordinarily rich source of information about the Chinese government’s interests, intentions, and goals—a subject of long-standing interest to the scholarly and policy communities.”

So what do the two papers say the Chinese government is doing with its censorship and monitoring activities? The 2013 paper concludes that “the purpose of the censorship program is to reduce the probability of collective action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected.” It goes on to say that “collective expression organized outside of governmental control equals factionalism and ultimately chaos and disorder.” The 2017 paper goes beyond censoring and identifies government-directed posts (fake user comments) meant to “distract and redirect public attention from discussions or events with collective action potential.” The authors estimate from the data they’ve gathered that “the [Chinese] government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year … largely comprised of cheerleading and distraction rather than engaged argument.”

Here we have a government trying to keep order by squashing collective action through the cutting of social ties (uprisings can’t begin in virtual space and then spill over into our physical space because nothing that might incite collective action is allowed to take root in virtual space) and the flooding of any potentially inflammatory thread with lots of distracting topics (before a post ever rises to the level of something the government might want to censor).

If you’re a government using this approach to keep the piece at home, it isn’t much of a leap to think that you might turn this approach into a weapon to attack another country. Instead of injecting distracting topics into a potentially inflammatory thread you’ve identified, what if you inserted posts that engaged more deeply in the emerging argument in an strategic attempt to raise the level disagreement and prevent compromise? What if instead of blocking social media sites or posts that created collective action, you created sites or posts in a foreign nation’s social media environment explicitly for collective action meant to strategically undermine that foreign government?

I’m not saying I know that any government is doing this to another government in today’s world. I’m just asking if you think it is possible in 2017…