Censorship glossarchive project phase one : developing metadata schema for cryptic circumlocutions in Chinese social media

Abstract

Chinese censors constantly evaluate and sanitize the electronic speech of her citizens in the name of service to the greater good. Yet while the hidden Internet enforcement agencies with specialized tools seek to enforce vaguely defined and sometimes shifting standards of expression, China's people continue to offer their own resistance ranging from thoughtful critiques to wisecracks, through both overt speech and cryptic circumlocutions. Little is known about what China's users know about the censors or what the censors know about their fellow cyber citizens. This study seeks to provide a basis by which we may begin to expand our knowledge of Internet censorship as practiced in the Peoples's Republic of China and, by extension, the rest of the world through a cyberethnographic examination of the politically sensitive posts on China's version of Twitter, Weibo with an emphasis on the deliberately deceptive practice of cryptic circumlocutions. An analysis of the known cryptic circumlocutions shows that while they may be arranged into a taxonomy, the metadata schema does not require strict adherence to the taxonomy in order to adequately catalog each discrete instance of Internet communication. The metadata schema proposed here is for the cataloging of various types of discrete Internet communication ranging from entire sites, articles on news sites, to blog comments or social media postings with an eye towards indexing the nature of sensitive expression as well as the type of cryptic expression.