To test these methods with Facebook, is near impossible. I had already experimented with a few posts before and non of them had been taken down, my only metric to measure success. And given the black box and sophistication of Facebook, this is outside the possibilities of that I can do with the time I have. So I decided to take to the Chinese censored apps where the censorship will be immediately evident.
I ordered a couple of extra sim cards and got to work creating accounts on these social networks.
Firstly, WeChat. Accounts created outside of China don’t censor messages or anything. So that wouldn’t work. Additionally, to get censored by WeChat, the account needs to be registered by a Chinese number, some Googling lead to this being impossible. And it required a Chinese Government ID when signing up.
Another method would be using someone else’s WeChat account but this is way to unethical given the extent the CCP will punish people for petty crimes against them.
QQ is very open with admitting the content I give them will be processed in China. However, signing up on both iOS and Android ultimately failed due to the app claiming issues with the phone numbers, despite using the international version of the app.
Finally say success on Weibo. Touted by many as Chinese Twitter.
Sent Hi back and forth a few times to ensure everything was working and then straight to work. Sent 六四天安門. Translates to “6/4tiananmen square” 6 4 being the date of Tiananmen square. Message not sent. Success.
Next, you can see from the other use the message didn’t send. But I sent it again with full stops from the english keyboard inserted between all the characters to fool the system. Was pretty sure this wouldn’t work but it did. Then tries with just the first full stop and it still worked. Couldn’t believe it was this easy.
Tried playing with finding which parts of the string got blocked and to what extent they interpret characters. So changing 六四 (six four) to 64 bypassed the censorship. And incorporating the blocked string in a longer string still got it blocked.
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Next, I tested the other methods. Adding an additional random character still worked. Adding a thin space also worked. Plus did not get rendered. Finally at the bottom the plain string got censored.
Currently these are the methods to obscure text to evade censorship. Glitch Text is unideal for Chinese and Han languages and similar characters are not a thing.