then attended by local officials. 120 By early July, state media were providing updates
on the girl’s cause of death and confirming that four officials had been fired as a result
of the incident. 121
At the same time, because these compulsory control mechanisms are actually implemented through informal processes, provider-based content control is neither narrow
nor entirely predictable. A study of Chinese blog service providers demonstrated that
there is substantial variation in censorship methods, the amount of content censored,
and providers’ transparency about deleting or depublishing content. 122 Similar findings were reached in a Citizen Lab study of four popular search engines in China,
which found significant variations in the level of transparency about filtering, actual
content censored, and methods used, suggesting that there is not a comprehensive system for determining censored content. 123 While Google and Microsoft, which are
hosted outside China, actually delisted certain search results, the two search engines
hosted inside China, Yahoo and Baidu, ran their Web crawlers behind China’s filtering
system, and therefore did not index Web sites already blocked by the Chinese government. Although Google censored considerably less than the other search engines, it
also has a practice of prioritizing authorized local content, which researcher Nart Villeneuve found amplified the significance of the censored Web sites, as they were the
only ones to offer differing viewpoints. 124 Indeed, the complexity of these informal
control mechanisms was further revealed in April 2009, when an employee of China’s
leading search engine, Baidu, leaked a folder containing the substance and flow of internal censorship. 125 These included lists of topics, keywords, and URLs to be blocked,
lists of banned forums, employee guidelines for monitoring work, censorship guidelines for the popular Baidu post bars, and guidelines of how to search for information
that needed to be banned. 126
The government’s filtering practices can cause considerable anger among China’s
Internet users, especially when entire platforms or tools such as RSS feed sites or
Twitter are blocked. 127 The uses of social media form the building blocks for what
blogger Isaac Mao calls sharism, where the ‘‘co-computing of people, networks, and
machines’’ forms a networked pipeline system to spread information in the face of
Internet crackdowns. 128
Because of a wide range of factors—from economic incentives and demographic
factors of the online community to the dragnet of legal liability—the impact of selfcensorship is likely enormous and increasingly public, if difficult to measure. Furthermore, the efforts of industry organizations at self-discipline are not entirely removed
from government oversight. In promoting ‘‘Internet cooperation,’’ officials place selfdiscipline hand-in-hand with admonitions to abide by Chinese laws. 129 The CIIRC
encourages the reporting of ‘‘illegal’’ or ‘‘harmful’’ information and is sponsored by
the Internet Society of China, formally registered as a civil society organization. 130 Yet
the CIIRC cited Baidu and Google’s Web and image search engines for returning a large
China
461
on the girl’s cause of death and confirming that four officials had been fired as a result
of the incident. 121
At the same time, because these compulsory control mechanisms are actually implemented through informal processes, provider-based content control is neither narrow
nor entirely predictable. A study of Chinese blog service providers demonstrated that
there is substantial variation in censorship methods, the amount of content censored,
and providers’ transparency about deleting or depublishing content. 122 Similar findings were reached in a Citizen Lab study of four popular search engines in China,
which found significant variations in the level of transparency about filtering, actual
content censored, and methods used, suggesting that there is not a comprehensive system for determining censored content. 123 While Google and Microsoft, which are
hosted outside China, actually delisted certain search results, the two search engines
hosted inside China, Yahoo and Baidu, ran their Web crawlers behind China’s filtering
system, and therefore did not index Web sites already blocked by the Chinese government. Although Google censored considerably less than the other search engines, it
also has a practice of prioritizing authorized local content, which researcher Nart Villeneuve found amplified the significance of the censored Web sites, as they were the
only ones to offer differing viewpoints. 124 Indeed, the complexity of these informal
control mechanisms was further revealed in April 2009, when an employee of China’s
leading search engine, Baidu, leaked a folder containing the substance and flow of internal censorship. 125 These included lists of topics, keywords, and URLs to be blocked,
lists of banned forums, employee guidelines for monitoring work, censorship guidelines for the popular Baidu post bars, and guidelines of how to search for information
that needed to be banned. 126
The government’s filtering practices can cause considerable anger among China’s
Internet users, especially when entire platforms or tools such as RSS feed sites or
Twitter are blocked. 127 The uses of social media form the building blocks for what
blogger Isaac Mao calls sharism, where the ‘‘co-computing of people, networks, and
machines’’ forms a networked pipeline system to spread information in the face of
Internet crackdowns. 128
Because of a wide range of factors—from economic incentives and demographic
factors of the online community to the dragnet of legal liability—the impact of selfcensorship is likely enormous and increasingly public, if difficult to measure. Furthermore, the efforts of industry organizations at self-discipline are not entirely removed
from government oversight. In promoting ‘‘Internet cooperation,’’ officials place selfdiscipline hand-in-hand with admonitions to abide by Chinese laws. 129 The CIIRC
encourages the reporting of ‘‘illegal’’ or ‘‘harmful’’ information and is sponsored by
the Internet Society of China, formally registered as a civil society organization. 130 Yet
the CIIRC cited Baidu and Google’s Web and image search engines for returning a large
China
461