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Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
@paulmozur
Sep 5, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Earlier this year Chinese police dragged Joanne Li from her house, manacled her to a chair, and interrogated her for 3 days. Her crime: sending a link on WeChat. For her, WeChat used to be fun. Now it reminds her of jail. nytimes.com/2020/09/04/tec…
Ms. Li's story is instructive as the Trump admin weighs a WeChat ban. In Toronto the app connected her to the Chinese community. But over time she saw how it disconnected that group from reality. Rumors were rife. Some were racist, others political: Image
When Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada, she was unsurprised when Chinese friends in China started saying the country had no rule of law. But she was shocked when many of her Chinese friends in Canada agreed. It showed the power of a state-guided filter bubble. Image
CUHK prof Fang Kecheng created an open course for Chinese on media literacy. Surprising numbers living overseas joined: "They were outside of China, but their media environment was still entirely inside China, their channel for information was all from public accounts on WeChat.”
Still, Mr. Fang said he opposes a ban. Creating internet blocks, he said, rarely improved the quality of information: “Information is like water. Water quality can be improved, but without any flow, water easily grows fetid.”
After her interrogation, using WeChat can be traumatic for Joanne. She writes with typos, self censors, and longs to stop using it. But she can't. She needs it for bills, work, and for a gov't mandated health code: “WeChat is terrible because there is no alternative."
When she was interrogated over the link she shared on WeChat, police insisted China had as much freedom of speech as Canada. It was am authoritarian moment straight from Orwell. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
"I didn’t say anything. I just thought, what is your freedom of speech? Is it the freedom to drag me down to the police station and keep me night after sleepless night interrogating me?” She said Americans should cherish the free speech they have. She longs to get back to Canada. Image

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More from @paulmozur

Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Dec 15, 2022
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine stalled, its television propaganda fired on all cylinders. In recent months we went through 1000s of emails from Russia's biggest state broadcaster to learn how. It was a master class in constructing an alternative reality. nytimes.com/2022/12/15/tec…
Each day Russian producers sent incredibly detailed lists of memes and media that could be used to undercut the West. Often that included right-wing cable TV and misleading memes, like this one, showing empty grocery shelves in the US:
Tucker Carlson was a favorite. “Don’t forget to take Tucker” producers wrote to a state-media journalist in the US, pointing to a clip where Tucker warned how opposing Russia and China could end the dollar’s status as a world reserve currency. They often used other clips too:
Read 9 tweets
Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Nov 28, 2022
It’s day 3 and still videos of protests spread on Chinese social media. We see some familiar tricks, people use filters and take videos of videos to bypass AI models designed to identify sensitive videos. Still, the scale of sharing is likely overwhelming censorship manpower.
It’s difficult to censor video. AI trained software can find specific videos, or things in videos (like candles and tanks). But it’s costly to train new algos and the diversity of protest videos makes it very tough. Thus you need people to check, that takes time.
Tactics like the above, video of a video, trip up the algos too. Ultimately, it’s not that the censorship apparatus is failing, it’s just hit it’s natural limit. When you have this many people posting this much and being creative, the world’s best internet control regime loses.
Read 6 tweets
Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Nov 27, 2022
Videos of protests across China are still visible on WeChat, even as they quickly become unplayable. This is definitely another Li Wenliang moment, when the full power of the world’s best censorship system battles the full fury of many Chinese. For now, the censors are struggling
It’s worth recalling since Li’s death, we’ve seen with increasing frequency online outrage that even China’s internet controls have struggled to contain. Shanghai lockdowns, Guizhou bus crash, now the Xinjiang fire. Each was a massive censorship event all its own.
It’s hard to know how large each given outpouring was. But the increasing frequency with which you see these mega censorship events is certainly a trend line that gets us to where we are now.
Read 4 tweets
Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Oct 28, 2022
Get ready for China state-affiliated commentators to raise objections/kiss up to Elon. It would be surprising if Musk doesn’t get lobbied by Beijing to cut Twitter’s labeling of China media/officials. We’ll see how he responds. Obvi big q is also how he handles China disinfo.
Exhibit two in the trend. Again China has been massively active on Twitter with bot nets boosting state media/diplomat disinfo efforts on Covid origins, mass internments in Xinjiang and Russian propaganda like Ukraine bio labs. Musk will have a test in how to deal with it.
For examples about how this works, last year we showed how Chinese state media and embassy accounts on twitter spread YouTube videos in which minority Uyghurs read rote scripts attesting to how free they were and how great their life was: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Read 9 tweets
Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Sep 22, 2022
We spent months digging through a 700 gigabyte cache from within Russia's de facto internet intel agency Roskomnadzor.

It gave us one of the most complete pictures yet of Putin's efforts to control the internet. It is at turns farcical and terrifying.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine proceeded, local officials in Bashkortostan, a republic east of Moscow where the files are from, noted down in detail online discontent and protests. They tallied views, likes, specific criticism of Putin, and updated dossiers of worst offenders.
The attention to detail from one small team in one tiny part of Russia is startling. They chronicle anti-war walks and complaints about inflation. At times the reports sound like weather forecasts. “Calm with separate minor pockets of tension,” one said after a dissident arrest.
Read 11 tweets
Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Jun 26, 2022
Awash in a sea of data, China authorities are trying to police the future.

It's not sci fi. Using vast data records on citizens, new software uses scoring and AI to predict crime and protest before they happen. Often the result is automated prejudice. nytimes.com/2022/06/25/tec…
It works like this: Police make blacklists of people they believe are suspicious: drug users, protesters, the mentally ill. Then they aim the surveillance system at those groups, collecting huge amounts of data on activity, location, relationships: nytimes.com/video/world/as…
Specialized software helps them program digital tripwires on predetermined behaviors they believe could signal a crime. If someone goes to a train station daily, but doesn't ride, they might be a pickpocket. An alarm instructs police to check on them. No warrant necessary.
Read 14 tweets

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