One method Chinese Netizens have found a way around the banned #meetoo phrase on Chinese social media is to substitute it with Chinese for Rice Bunny, as they sound similar. This provides a mechanism to publicly evade online censorship. The traditional alternative would be to use a VPN to access uncensored platforms. However, as you can see from the Taiwanese Facebook posts, this no longer a sure fire option. Plus being able to bypass the censorship on the desired, popular platforms, means that more people will see it and more importantly the people who need to see it will. The ones who otherwise remain ignorant to censored media.
For people outside China, censorship of commonly the extent of CHinas power over then, howver for those in China, getting detained is the punishment often for those who support freedom. In this case the Rice Bunny/#MeeToo movement.
Another case of non government controlled censorship of YouTube removing a film and only reinstating it due to outrage followed by a proper review. The take down request came from Saudi ruler King Abdullah. This means multiple governments are controlling media on multiple western platforms that only have to abide by US laws on freedom of speech and expression. The other law that would apply is Section 230 that allows the platform to remove content at their own discretion, but neither of these apply here.
Another case is this playlist of videos, now avaliable, that compiles videos YouTube took doen in replation to gootage on the ground in Syria. As a result the site Syrian Archive not stands to preserve media about the ongoings in Syria. All of these examples show political motive with an attempt to control local and foriegn citizens knowledge as a basis of control.
In response to many of the problems with unlawful content online that caused many of the problems raised here, the EU has decided it can force Facebook to remove content internationally. So the EU has decided it can police the internet globally.
“The European Court of Justice came to its decision after an Austrian politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, requested an order that would force Facebook to remove comments that were “harmful to her reputation.” Glawischnig-Piesczek argued that Facebook should remove the comments and limit access to them worldwide. The court ruled against Facebook, dealing a heavy hit on tech companies as lawmakers and platforms continue to discuss how to regulate online speech.” Source: The Verge
This takes it one step further, one member of the EU parliament is clearly in ints case abusing her power to suppress criticism of her.
One talk show comedian posted a methods to evade this censorship being posting a link in another language.
On the topic of translating media to other languages this twitter account translated Russian memes into english.
This led me to the idea of having a twitter bot that could translate posts using a specific hashtag or monitoring specific hashtags to spread media across languages.
In experimenting with how to obscure I experimented with adding different width spaces. Adding thin spaces between letters amounts to really poor kerning but still allows for really readable text, as knowledge of the words and the standard spaces being bigger mask the effect of the thin space when reading.
Origional string
String with hair spaces added
Original string 464 characters
New string 644 characters
Link to site You can see in the fourth image where the additional characters have been added. Note, there are duplicates of thin spaces next to eachother. The final use wont look bas as the second image.
