Having worked as a censor for Sina Weibo, Liu Lipeng has a deep understanding of online censorship in China and how it is used to control public opinion.
His years of censoring online content have made him aware of the false appearances and the “dirty” behind Chinese online public opinion. During his tenure as a censor, he kept a censorship log of his daily work, which he later made available to foreign media outlets to give them a glimpse of what was going on.
In 2020, during the New coronavirus outbreak, he left China for the United States with his Family out of fear of Beijing‘s increasingly sweeping surveillance practices, and made his logs public to expose the inner workings of China’s Internet censorship and confront the system.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Liu Lipeng said he hopes that telling his story will help more people realize that censorship in China is “really happening every day” so that they can adopt “more effective strategies to interpret” information about China.
“Why do I want to be a censor?”
When I first applied for the position of Weibo editor, the job description required that candidates be politically sensitive, so I could guess that the job would probably be content censorship, but I didn’t know exactly what a censor did at the Time, so I joined with curiosity.
The job was like a censorship factory, an assembly line, why would I want to do this job? In China, if I’m not working in a digital factory, I’m working in an electronics factory.
It’s not a good job, it’s like a “dirty job”, I feel like I’m doing something wrong, but other people don’t feel it, they just think it’s a living.
Most of my colleagues don’t use their own product (Sina Weibo) because they are censors themselves, so they don’t use it, only me and another friend do because I really like social media and the space to express myself on it.
“There is no training or instruction manual.”
We have no formal training, in fact we don’t need any training, anyone born and raised in China, with a basic Education in China and a university degree should understand the so-called Chinese version of political correctness and which are sensitive words, in this regard you can say that Chinese brainwashing is done quite successfully.
We don’t have any instruction manuals telling us which sensitive words to delete and which ones to publish, but rather we often receive direct orders from above telling us that because of a political event, all words related to it should be deleted and blocked.
2011 to 2013 I served as a network censor during the beginning to receive direct orders to delete posts blocked every day, to later a day can have dozens of requests to delete posts blocked sensitive words, and then to delete posts blocked more and more sensitive words, a day can have more than 200 instructions.
“I keep a daily review log.”
Because of this work, I had to read a lot of content every day, perhaps up to hundreds of thousands of words, and I also kept a daily review log of my work, which I later provided to foreign media, and now when I arrive in the U.S. I also organize it for publication on the China Digital Times website.
At the time I kept the censorship logs, I didn’t feel afraid or that it was very dangerous work because I was doing the censorship work in the background and I was personally using a VPN to hide my identity, but I didn’t realize the seriousness of the situation until I looked back at the accumulated information I had.
I left China for the United States last year because I was worried about my safety, because I had provided censored content to foreign media, and that alone could have gotten me into trouble.
(When I left China) my heart was hanging in the air until the moment the plane took off; like the movie “Escape from Tehran,” my heart didn’t settle until after the plane finally took off.
“I decided I had to leave China.”
Another reason I left China was that since the outbreak of the new crown Epidemic, China’s control over the country was getting stricter and stricter, with checkpoints everywhere and the requirement to swipe my phone for a personal code everywhere, and I decided to get out in such a situation where there was no privacy whatsoever that was getting worse by the day.
I didn’t want the censorship logs I had recorded to disappear forever if I was personally arrested or met with something untoward, so I went to the US to publish them on my website.
Because of the Great Firewall, China controls domestic online content very well, and in recent years has also poured national efforts into developing an external public opinion offensive, conducting a major foreign propaganda campaign, and using a fifty-cent online army as a public opinion punching bag, a situation few in the Western world understand.
I hope that by describing my personal experience, more people will realize that censorship does exist in China, and that it happens every day.
The more people who are aware of this, the more effective strategies can be used to interpret information about China.
About ByteDance and TikTok
TikTok doesn’t need web censors at all. ByteTok has 20,000 content managers (or content optimizers) whose job is to look at the videos on it every day, and the so-called algorithms, or machine learning, can only identify what objects and actions appear in the video, but there is no way to tell whether the video is eye-catching or not, and only human optimization can do that. So they have 20,000 people working on content optimization every day, and they have built censorship into the content optimization process.
In 2018, ByteDance announced that they were going to expand the recruitment of 10,000 content optimization administrators in China, and TikTok was probably the product that caught fire after that, because they use a lot of content optimization to make the content look good and also censor it.
We have no way to know if they are censoring TikTok in China right now because of the very strict internal secrecy of ByteBeat, but in 2018, I once went to a ByteBeat office building and their HR manager told me explicitly that they were going to do TikTok censorship, but they couldn’t disclose to the public that they were censoring overseas users.
The place I went was on the 17th floor of an upscale office building in Tianjin, and the HR manager waited for me at the door, opened the door and took me inside, walking around in circles inside the building instead of passing directly through the work area, and he warned me not to look inside, it was very confidential, like entering a drug lord’s lair.
I thought to myself, “Why don’t you just put a black head covering on me?
Answering questions about the Xinjiang censorship at Clubhouse
I was on Clubhouse with the China Digital Times website to answer questions about Internet censorship in China, and I didn’t expect so many people to be interested in the topic, asking three questions per person.
The moderator turned off the show of hands for over an hour into the program, but there were still a lot of questions to answer, and I ended up answering for four and a half hours with over 1,400 people still online in the chat room.
On the subject of Xinjiang, the Chinese censorship system is very discriminatory and totally disrespectful to Uighurs or the Uighur language, and the rules that any civilized world abides by are nothing in the eyes of China.
If a censor sees a Uyghur on the backstage, whatever he says is deleted directly, and the same is true in the live broadcast, if you hear someone speak Uyghur you are warned to switch to Chinese or you have to turn off the broadcast.
Such rules are terrible.
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