China’s social media information control system is decentralized and characterized by “intermediary liability,” or what China refers to as “self-discipline,” allowing the Chinese government to push responsibility for information control to the private sector. Internet operators which are deemed to have failed to have adequately implemented information controls are liable to receive fines, have their business licenses revoked, or be the recipient of other adverse actions. These companies are largely left to decide on their own regarding what to proactively censor on their platforms, attempting to balance the expectations of their users with appeasing the Chinese government. In China, block messages are often not displayed by Chinese platforms and therefore users have no way of knowing the legal justification for the blocked content. However, in Russia, VK ultimately attributed the blocking of each video, community, or person to whichever court case ordered the blocking of that content. In some cases, we were able to find the text of the court case and retrieve the laws cited in justifying the takedown request. While much may be lacking in terms of due process in Russia’s court-ordered blocking approach, this system is still more transparent than in China, where blocking decisions are more proactively done by the private sector, with blocking decisions being left largely to the discretion of Internet operators.
Chinese social media companies have struggled to grow their platforms globally and to apply information controls while they expand. Tencent’s WeChat has been scrutinized for its application of Chinese political censorship and surveillance, either expressly or secretly, to conversations among users entirely registered outside of China. Furthermore, when using WeChat, users have no visibility into whether they are communicating with a user registered in China and therefore cannot predict the extent to which their communications will be subject to political censorship or surveillance. Unlike Tencent, Bytedance simply abandoned the idea of growing a single platform with radically different information control rules for users inside versus outside of China. Instead, Bytedance operates Douyin inside China and a platform with a completely distinct user base, TikTok, outside of China. VK’s approach of blocking community and user accounts, but not content directly, may have some advantage in alleviating the friction in attempting to expand VK globally, or outside of the Russian information control regime. On VK, users in Russia are simply unable to communicate or read the content of users blocked in Russia, and thus there have not been negative media stories covering how non-Russia-based users are having their content deleted in the style of those covering WeChat. This difference is because, on VK, politically motivated blocking is seemingly applied only to users and not individual content.
At a high level, there are both similarities and differences in the topics censored in Russia and China. In both countries, foreign news sources and criticism of its top leaders are subject to censorship. However, each country also has their particular sensitivities. For instance, while Chinese social media has not always been friendly to LGBTIQ content, in Russia, such content is aggressively targeted, as facilitated by the anti-LGBTIQ “propaganda” laws. In light of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is also particularly sensitive to content that is critical of the Russian side of the armed conflict. Conversely, some of China’s evergreen political sensitivities include the Falun Gong spiritual/political movement, the status of Taiwan, and calls for independence of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. While Chinese social media has also been quick to censor content related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we did not find differential censorship relating to COVID-19 on VK, but this might be because such content was removed in all regions that we analyzed.
While both China and Russia use Internet censorship to protect the political images of their own leaders, they are inconsistent in how they protect the images of each others’ leaders. Although Chinese Internet platforms appear willing to help protect the image of Putin, we found no evidence of VK blocking content critical of Xi Jinping or any other Chinese leader. In our ongoing study of censorship on Chinese search platforms, we have found that Chinese search engines Baidu and Sogou and video sharing site Bilibili enforce censorship rules relating to “普京” [Putin]. As examples, we found that search queries on Sogou containing “普京 + 独裁” [Putin + dictatorship], “普京 + 希特勒” [Putin + Hitler], or “普京窃国” [Putin’s kleptocracy] restricted search results to only Chinese state media websites and other Beijing-aligned sources. While some censorship rules seem solely focused on protecting Putin’s image, others may reveal China’s less-than-altruistic motivations in doing so. For instance, “普京亲信兵变 + 震动中南海” [mutiny of Putin’s cronies + shaking in the Chinese Communist Party’s headquarters] and “台湾 + 成为下一个乌克兰” [Taiwan + becoming the next Ukraine] reveal China’s insecurities concerning how Prigozhin’s mutiny may be predictive of the future stability of Chinese Communist Party’s own regime and how Russia’s unanticipated difficulties invading Ukraine may be prognostic of any future realization of China’s own ambitions to invade Taiwan. More generally, Chinese censors may be motivated to protect Putin’s image not only because Russia is an ally of China but also because of the similarities in and therefore common insecurities born from their methods of governance. Regardless of Chinese censors’ motivations here, we found no evidence that Russia’s VK reciprocated the favor by helping to protect China’s leaders from criticism on VK.
Finally, while there are theories that the Internet is “balkanizing” or becoming a “splinternet” wherein different countries or regions slowly form their own isolated networks over time, examples of social media censorship from both China and Russia show that the borders of these isolated networks may be fairly permissive but only in one direction. On WeChat, users with China-registered accounts are subject to the platform’s invasive political censorship, whereas users in other countries can not only access WeChat but also express political ideas with one another with relative amounts of freedom compared to their Chinese counterparts. We find the same with VK in that VK subjects users in Russia to pervasive levels of political censorship, whereas users in other countries are not only allowed membership on the site but are also relatively more free to engage in political speech. In an irony, each of these social media networks subjugates users from the country in which the network was founded with the greatest restrictions, whereas, not only do these networks allow users to join from other countries but also grant these users the freedom to engage in a larger range of political expression.
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