Encrypted messaging service WhatsApp yesterday suffered intermittent disruptions in China as authorities tightened censorship ahead of a major Chinese Communist Party meeting.
Attempts to set up new WhatsApp accounts on some cellphones were met with network error messages. Others reported difficulty sending images and video on the service, which is owned by Facebook and offers more privacy than government-monitored Chinese social media.
Chinese authorities are tightening controls on social media ahead of the party’s 19th National Congress next month, at which Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is expected to be appointed to a second five-year term as leader.
The ruling party encourages Internet use for education and business, but tries to block access to material that calls for political change or is deemed to encourage protests.
Since rising to power in 2012, Xi has promoted the notion of “Internet sovereignty,” or the right of Beijing and other governments to dictate what their publics can do and see online.
Private-sector operators of Chinese social media are required to delete banned material.
Earlier this month, regulators announced that organizers of messaging groups would be held responsible for managing their content.
China has the world’s biggest population of Internet users, with about 730 million people online.
The Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to questions sent by fax about whether Chinese regulators were causing the WhatsApp disruption.
Facebook declined to comment. WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular messaging services, with more than 1.2 billion users.
The latest disruptions are affecting users intermittently across the world’s second-largest economy, intensifying a blocking effort that began around July, but has gotten more sophisticated in ensuing months, said Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptographer at Paris-based online security firm Symbolic Software.
Starting last week, WhatsApp users in China began noticing sporadic outages as government cybercops played a cat-and-mouse game with the messaging platform, Kobeissi said.
The country’s “Great Firewall” surveillance regime is configured to censor traffic based on connections to servers and addresses, but the Facebook service rotates among multiple server addresses so it takes time for censors to catch up, he said.
“The rotating server addresses keep the network efficient, but it also has an unintended side effect, which is it circumvents censorship of the Chinese firewall,” said Kobeissi, who focuses on messaging encryption. “It might have taken a while for the Great Firewall to adapt, but it’s catching up.”
Kobeissi said he suspects censors were able to block WhatsApp images and voice messages based on the secure HTTPS protocol, but it took time to upgrade their tools to screen text messages based on the “Noise” protocol — a framework that allows WhatsApp to work more efficiently.
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