Beijing mines Western social media sites to hunt down critics

China has expanded its vast domestic internet surveillance programs to include western social media sites.

China is ‘reorienting’ its efforts to control the internet beyond its own borders.

China has expanded its vast domestic internet surveillance programs to include Western social media sites as it tries to build profiles on dissidents, journalists, academics and politicians.

A review of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings by The Washington Post has uncovered a $US320,000 program by state media to mine Twitter and Facebook to create a database of its “targets”. It also found a $US216,000 police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as a cyber centre that catalogues overseas content in the ethnic Uighur language.

State media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators have purchased sophisticated systems to mine data on Western sites, it reported. “Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” an analyst who works for a unit reporting to the ruling party’s central propaganda department in Beijing told the newspaper.

Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, said Beijing was “reorienting” its efforts to control the internet beyond its own borders. “I think that’s frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China,” she said.

A separate review of documents by The New York Times has shown efforts by Beijing to create fake accounts, generate content, draw followers and track critics on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are inaccessible from China without the use of a virtual private network. The campaign also targets Chinese citizens living outside the country who speak out against the government, tracking down family members at home and pressuring them to compel the critics to remove posts or even close their accounts.

The Times