Facebook does this too right?
China?s Censors Can Now Erase Images Mid-Transmission
Internet police step up their ability to filter photos
Wu Yangwei, a friend of the long-jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said he used popular messaging app WeChat to send friends a photo of a haggard Mr. Liu embracing his wife. Mr. Wu believed the transmissions were successful, but he said his friends never saw them. ?Sometimes you can get around censors by rotating the photo,? said Mr. Wu, a writer better known by his pen name, Ye Du. ?But that doesn?t always work.?
China?s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength?the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.
The ability is part of a broader technology push by Beijing?s censors to step up surveillance and get ahead of activists and others communicating online in China.
Displays of this new image-filtering capability kicked into high gear last week as Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo lay dying from liver cancer and politically minded Chinese tried to pay tribute to him, according to activists and a new research report.
There were disruptions on Tuesday to another popular messaging app, Facebook Inc.?s WhatsApp, with many China-based users saying they were unable to send photos and videos without the use of software that circumvents Chinese internet controls. Text messages appeared to be largely unaffected.
WhatsApp, which employs encryption that allows users to have secure conversations, is one of the few foreign messaging apps that has gone unblocked in China. Supporters of Mr. Liu had been using it to exchange information and images of the Nobel laureate in recent days.
WhatsApp made no technical changes that would limit its service in China, a person familiar with the matter said.
Chinese internet censorship first concentrated on the development of word-screening software to root out politically objectionable content. As a result, internet users over the past couple of years turned to sending photos to evade cyber police. In response, censors upped their game by demonstrating the ability to purge images from group chats and public posts.
In a new report, researchers from the University of Toronto?s Citizen Lab said they observed that WeChat expanded its image censorship to one-to-one chats for the first time, in the wake of Mr. Liu?s death on Thursday.