Research: Complicit & Surveillance Censorship

“In allowing ourselves to be complicit, we potentially allow those in power to take away some of our rights forever.”

(Jolley, R. 2020; 1)

When one thinks of complicit censorship, the first thought one often thinks of is China’s ‘great firewall’, a list of western web addresses, words, and phrases blocked from accessing by native residents, by the big tech firms such as Google and Microsoft under the guidance of the Chinese authorities. The Photographer’s Gallery All I Know is What’s On The Internet (2018) featured two artists who commented on the phenomenon of China’s censorship Winnie Soon and Miao Ying. Soon’s Unerasable Images (2018), a looping screenshot driven video of China’s censorship of the Tiananem Square Protest, reveals the only presence as being a 2013 Lego reconstruction which flickers in and out of existance, circulating, then getting erased.

Figure 1 Soon, W. (2018) Unerasable Images, HD Video

“Screenshooting the results and combining the pages, she created a video of the Lego Tank Man avatar-itself a replacement that can’t help but draw attention to the absence to the absence of its own original-in which he comes and goes, flickering into life to a relentless four-on-the-floor rhythm.”

(Riches, H. 2019)

On her website, Soon writes her intent as means of aiming to create a temporal and empty networked space as means of examining the geopolitics of data circulation, internet censorship and the materiality of image production and reproduction. Whilst we may think that our presence on the internet is temporal and easily removed and erased from existence, anything we do contribute can potentially live on forever, either via another user downloading and reuploading an image or video, screenshotting, restaging or archiving the source page itself. You effectively lose control by contributing, and this is proven by the recurring presence of an image that has been sought to be erased from the narrative. Soon’s intent is not limited to just Unerasable Images with her practice branching out to look at digital authoritarianism of text and emojis censored by social media sites such as Weibo.

Figure 2 Ying, M. (2015) Flowers all fallen, Birds far gone. LAN Love Poem.

“From one side of the wall, the Chinese internet appears to be a barren wasteland, yet despite its limitations, it has been evolving and growing—even faster than the net outside the wall. New memes are created rapidly, depending on what underground culture decides to make pertaining to mainstream culture and internet with Chinese characteristics, which is self-censorship. If you know something will be censored, you can go around it, using homophones, making up new words, etc., which all involve a sense of humor and intelligence. You will be shocked by how creative netizens are. The limit of the Chinese internet is what sets it free.“

Ying, M. [in] Whittaker, I. (2015)

Miao Ying’s LAN Love Poem.gif (2014-2015) is a series of GIFs which combine snapshots of censored websites in China (in the case of Figure 2 features Twitter) with online signatures by Chinese netizens, collected and translated into ‘Chinglish’ by the artist. Ying’s intent appears to be to highlight and represent the romaticised stockholmesque relationship Chinese netizens have with their firewalled internet, how people use colloquialisms and metaphors to get around the censorship and to discuss the censorship itself. On Ying’s website she describes the intent behind Figure 2 as having a double narrative, on one hand she describes the scenery as an imagined teenage boy “…standing outside of his girlfriend’s window after they broke up and feeling hopeless.” (Ying, M. 2015), a scene that is considered heart wrenchingly sentimental, yet this background layer view is obscured by a browser window that depicts twitter as being inaccessible, a hopeless faraway bird. Figure 2 is not the only GIF in the series which makes use of narrative and double entendres, another in the series compares the loss of access to instagram and thus a partner’s smile being lost as searching for it on hundred degrees (Baidu) shows no results. Much like Soon, Ying’s practice has a recurring theme of commenting on digital authoritarianism particularly on topics and politics around China’s firewall, which she describes as the Chinternet, mocking with her series ChinternetPlus (2016) the ideology of counterfitting existing information and social media solely for the Chinese audience, behind the firewall.

Despite it feeling as a Westerner that the internet available to us is less restrictive, less authoritarian and more transparent than China, the reality is far more complex. Other artists who exhibited with Ying and Soon in The Photographers Gallery All I Know is What’s On The Internet (2018) have highlighted the hidden censorship we face, particularly the work of Eva and Franco Mattes Abuse Standards Violations (2016-), mentioned in a prior post a few modules ago, which depicts internet content moderations guidelines that are intended to make the internet a safer place. Yet due to technology developments over recent years such as the rise of the deep fake and AI, these guidelines become even more hazy, shades of grey and much more difficult to moderate. Frary’s following quote summarises I feel the reality of western internet, we take the services for free, not realising quite the cost, or if we do we complicitly censor elements of ourselves we don’t desire to share to the wider public:

“The reality is that free services are not free, and many of those billions of users are happy to be complicit in order to make their lives easier.”

(Frary, M. 2020; 31)

When it comes to Western censorship the assumption is that it’s either self-driven, or policed by the provider of the service in question alone. However looking at Google’s transparency reports in regards to content pulled under request of various government organisations, it seems some of this censoring is actually driven by government requests, with the last few years largely pointing at removing content from YouTube, which is interesting when you consider how with the development of Web 2.0, we the consumer have increasingly strayed from the written word consumption to more visual consumption. Looking at the data of individual countries, most sought reasons is enlightening with the majority of removed content in the US appearing to be removed due to defamation yet for countries such as the Uk, the majority of removed content appears to have been removed due to privacy and security reasons instead.

References

Figures

Figure 1 Soon, W. (2018) Unerasable Images, HD Video. [Online] Available from: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/the-photographers-gallery-all-i-know-is-what-s-on-the-internet [Accessed 27/03/2021]

Figure 2 Ying, M. (2015) Flowers all fallen, Birds far gone. LAN Love Poem. [Online] Available from: https://www.miaoyingstudio.com/5 [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Bibliography

Chan, C; Dao, A; Hou, J; Jin, T. & Tuong, C. (2011) Free Speech vs Maintaining Social Cohesion: Google Censorship. [Online] Available from: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/FreeExpressionVsSocialCohesion/google_policy.html [Accessed 29/03/2021]

Frary, M. (2020) “Nothing in life is free.” Complicity: Why and when we choose to censor ourselves and give away our privacy. Index on Censorship, Volume 49 No 1, Spring 2020. pg 31. Norwich; SAGE Publishing.

Google Transparency Report (2011-) Government requests to remove content. [Online] Available from: https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/overview [Accessed 29/03/2021]

Human Rights Watch (2006) II. How Censorship Works in China: A Brief Overview. [Online] Available from: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/3.htm [Accessed 26/03/2021]

Jolley, R. (2020) Complicity: Why and when we choose to censor ourselves and give away our privacy. Index on Censorship, Volume 49 No 1, Spring 2020. pg 1. Norwich; SAGE Publishing.

Murray, J. (2020) PHO702: Week 8: Responses and Responsibilities: Research. [Online] Available from: https://jasmphotography.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/week-8-responses-and-responsibilities-2/ [Accessed 27/03/2021]

Riches, H. (2019) After Image: Vol 46, Issue 1, March 2019. Exhibition Review: All I Know Is What’s On The Internet. [Online] Available from: https://online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/article-abstract/46/1/47/20825/Exhibition-Review-All-I-Know-Is-What-s-On-The?redirectedFrom=fulltext [Accessed 27/03/2021]

Soon, W. (2018) Unerasable Images. [Online] Available from: https://siusoon.net/unerasable-images/ [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Soon, W. (2020) Unerasable Characters II. [Online] Available from: https://siusoon.net/unerasable-characters-ii/ [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Soon, W. (2021) Unerasable Characters III. [Online] Available from: https://siusoon.net/unerasable-characters-iii/ [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Ying, M. (2015) Flowers all fallen, Birds far gone. LAN Love Poem. [Online] Available from: https://www.miaoyingstudio.com/5 [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Ying, M. [in] Whittaker, I. (2015) Rhizome: Artist Profile: Miao Ying. [Online] Available from: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/jul/08/artist-profile-miao-ying/ [Accessed 28/03/2021]

Ying, M. (2016) Chinternet Plus. [Online] Available from: https://www.miaoyingstudio.com/1 and https://www.chinternetplus.com/ [Accessed 28/03/2021]