(TibetanReview.net, Jul27, 2013) – Internet control in China has become even more sophisticated and pervasive under the country’s new leadership which assumed government power in March this year and is especially intrusive over ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs, said Washington-based rights group Freedom House in a new report Jul 24. “In Tibet and Xinjiang, police searched mobile handsets for banned content, and jailed dozens for using digital tools,” report said.
And the report, Throttling Dissent: China’s New Leaders Refine Internet Control, continued: “Tibetans, Uighurs and other individuals and groups subject to monitoring have been frequently targeted with e-mailed programs that install spyware on the user’s device.”
The report, covering the period of May 1, 2012, to Apr 30, 2013, said that information on unrest, such as Tibetan self-immolations, were “especially curtailed.”
On the internet control in China generally, the report said, “China’s internet controls, which were already among the most extensive in the world, have grown even more sophisticated and pervasive under the new Communist Party leadership.”
The report continued that the Chinese authorities employ “the most elaborate system for internet content control in the world” to keep track of its online population estimated at 564 million. It said government agencies and private companies employ thousands of people to monitor, censor, and manipulate content, from news reports to social-network pages while private companies also stepped up their capacity to delete banned content, sometimes within minutes.
The 47-page report said authoritarian regimes around the world look to Chinese methods of information control as a model.