Cyberwatchdogs and officials from the Czech Republic, Australia, Japan and Europe have denounced support of Huawei Technologies Co building infrastructure for 5G networks, but blocking Chinese access to global telecom networks is not going to fend off a cyberattack.
Additionally, US President Donald Trump’s administration has initiated plans to create an executive order that would allow it to ban any Chinese company from telecom systems in the US, given the laundry list of concerns if access was granted, which includes spying, intellectual property theft and malware.
With so much of the international attention given to Huawei’s potential control over 5G, a technology that is not supposed to arrive for another five to 10 years, there is a much easier and more immediate form of power and control that can be used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at any moment. With 1.4 billion people at its expense and the Internet being an extraordinarily huge platform, individual moderation of anti-China comments or sentiment on publications is not a far-fetched notion.
Yeni Safak, an extreme right-wing Turkish publication, on Feb. 9 reported that 55-year-old Uighur Abdurehim Heyit had died after being tortured in a Chinese detention center in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. The detention camp is real, but the death is still unconfirmed.
Yeni Safak also has a record for publishing false or misleading material, usually manipulating information in a way that supports Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the notorious leader who is singlehandedly responsible for sending Turkey into a democratic backslide.
Users on popular news feed aggregator and online forum Reddit had repeatedly tried to post links to the article and comments in response, but were met with moderators who kept blocking or removing the posts. In response to the article, Chinese state media released a video with what appears to be Heyit, on the record, stating the date and confirming that he was unharmed and very much alive.
However, the validity of the video remains “suspicious,” said Nury Turkel, chairman of the US-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. He suggested that because China has an abundance of resources and access to advanced technology, a proof-of-life video is no challenge and can be easily doctored.
The moderators insisted that the posts were removed because they did not follow guidelines and that the article was not fact-checked, which is a reasonable argument.
However, users were angry and believed that they were being censored by the Chinese government, given Chinese conglomerate Tencent’s purchase earlier this month of a 4 percent stake in Reddit.
Upon closer inspection of each of the accused moderator’s past activity on the platform, there is not exactly a history of pro-China sentiments or actions that would suggest censorship of anything they deemed harmful to the country’s reputation.
For example, one of the moderators recently commented on a separate thread: “The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of 1.4 billion is a statistic. The whole US 7th Fleet laughs in your face” under a picture of an atomic bomb that had the title: “Wave bye bye bye China.” Yikes.
There was no proof that these moderators are puppets of the regime and their activity online suggests otherwise, but by removing any comments in response to the Uighur article, it effectively feeds an assured and familiar narrative to the CCP, a dictatorship that has had its own long and successful proven track record with censorship and brainwashing of its citizens. A country, where unsurprisingly, Reddit is banned.
Although not proven to be a government initiative, an act of censorship encourages a 1.4 billion moderator army (individuals) to inflict immediate damage by prohibiting free thought and free speech. (First Amendment, anyone?)
Its unsurfaced pro-China support from the lone-wolf type individuals who have access to a keyboard and a computer. Username LordArnaut wrote under the Uighur article: “Stop propagating the hate towards the country of China,” and if you look at the user’s most recent activity, there are smatterings of anti-US and pro-China remarks. “Alibaba sells great omelet makers,” “Tsingtao is the best beer,” “Have you ever thought about buying a motorcycle from Zongshen?” “America propaganda machine at work,” and even states that Mongolian cuisine is very “bland” compared with its neighboring countries.
Within China, there are Internet moderators called wumao (五毛), which translates to 50 cents (reportedly what they get paid in yuan per post) to manipulate public opinion online in favor of the CCP, an eerie parallel to the collection of government-affiliated Russian trolls who had the ability to spread chaos and affect political elections in the US.
Xiao Qiang (蕭強), a Macarthur fellow, and director and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Counter Power Lab who became famous for taking on China’s “Great Firewall” of censorship, published a leaked propaganda directive sent to the 50 cent commentators and basically outlined their priorities.
The list included focusing on the US as the target of criticism, dispelling notions that Taiwan exists, employing heartfelt historical narratives of a once “weak people” in order “to stir up pro-party and patriotic emotions” and to “use America’s and other countries’ interference in international affairs to explain how Western democracy is actually an invasion of other countries.”
In the grand scheme, Tencent’s US$150 million investment in Reddit is not a lot. However, for the Chinese “moderator army,” a Chinese ownership or stake in something gives it a sense of permission and ownership, especially on an online platform where social and political commentary run amok.
Although not quite enforcing censorship, Tesla was required to start sharing driver data with the Chinese government after receiving funding support. Financial investments from China tend to have strings attached, strings that benefit Beijing in the long run and give it a form of power and control. The debt-trap diplomacy practice in the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota is another prime example of such manipulation.
For online platforms abroad, researchers at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University have said that the CCP’s usual tactic is to shrug off negative press.
Perhaps it has not hired 50 cent moderators for overseas platforms, but given its history and their successful brainwashing campaigns that have lasted generations, any type of perceived censorship would entice and reinforce the 1.4 billion “moderator army” to target reputation-harming sentiments and remarks, sway public opinion and attempt to control the narrative.
It is not on the same scale as a 5G network cyberattack, but it is effective, clandestine and cheaper than 50 cents per post (because it is merely a free symptom from years of brainwashing and censorship).
Similar to lone-wolf terrorist attacks, specific individuals who intend to inflict harm or disarray without any active government direction are free to pick up a keyboard, sign in and start moderating (read: block or remove) comments that are not pro-China, or add comments that are in support of the regime.
Jana Meisenholder is an Australian-Taiwanese journalist residing in the US.
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