On 2019-01-18 9:04 am, Antonela Debiasi wrote:
Hi Kate,
Everybody is a UX person in an organization who advocate for users. So, don't apologize!
I couldn't agree more. We have a work in progress about Personas, and I'd love to have your input at the next UX meeting. We made a kind of affinity map with the people who assisted in our security training in global-south during 2018; we found similarities between them and patterns emerged that can be observed in each group.
It allowed us to close up into five Personas that we are defining nowadays. We also got a very insightful session during our Mexico City Dev Meeting. Notes are public.
Tl;dr: Ranty discussion of censorship in China maybe telling you stuff you already know :)
Hi Antonela,
Thanks for your friendly note, which I read and thought a lot about. Great to hear that personas are in the works. I'm not finding the notes about them, could you possibly send me a link when you get a moment? Apologies in advance if they are somewhere obvious.
I hope one of the personas we use is this woman in China uploading video on her phone (the sentence where every part is hard, but wow if we can do it). And I hope we eventually choose user traffic goals for China, because the scale and impact of China's censorship is massive, unprecedented, and is contributing to a human rights catastrophe.
There are 800 million people on the (censored) Internet in China, over twice the entire population of the US.
I think it's useful to think about anti-censorship in more than one light simultaneously (and forgive me if I am obvious here). What are the technical challenges and goals? What are the overall anticensorship goals? If we build a useable, secure tool, and people don't use it, are we meeting our goals? I know that Antonela is focused on integrating user feedback into the project. As she knows but maybe not everyone knows, getting user uptake from people in a place like Iran (where a lot of people used an anti-censorship tool in the past few years) is much different from China, where according to Berkman-Klein Institute only 2%-3% use one.
Meanwhile, a million people in China have been rounded up recently and sent to detention camps, where they are being tortured and beaten. China's human rights situation is worsening by the day, and censorship is one of the tent poles that allows this to happen. That's why China employs and outsources hundreds of thousands of people to censor the Internet, and has invested a ton of money in machine learning for online censorship. China's internal security budget is larger than its military budget, and a lot of that is thought to go to surveillance and censorship. It's gotten even bigger in the last two years to fund the camp system.
President Xi has launched a massive propaganda campaign to support his approach, justifying it as necessary for social stability. Again, uncensored information is generally out of reach for ~98% of people who use the Internet. I was surprised to learn that people do *not* generally use VPNs in China or other tools to allow them to get through the Great Fire Wall. We probably know people who do, but it turns out that they are an extreme minority. According to a 2015 survey, only about 30% of Internet users surveyed even realized they could evade Great Firewall censorship; a mere 5% had ever tried a VPN.
Lack of information has real-world consequences in China, as it does in all censored countries. Chinese people have been prevented from having uncensored information for a generation, and that also has an effect.
Few NGOs focus on secure, anti-censorship tools in China; it's powerful that Tor is working on this. I don't mean to imply that other countries with horrific censorship problems aren't important; they are. Or that we will miraculously free people in China if our anti-censorship project works. Who knows what will happen? But censorship is at scale in China and there are currently no secure tools to compete with it. So I hope we include goals for China in the project.
Joined the UX team, which is awesome,
Katie :)
ps: There's much to read about censorship in China, but to paint the picture, a good place to start is here: the recently released report on online rights by Freedom House. They name China the "Worst abuser of Internet freedom in 2018." https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018/rise-digital-au... (The US gets bad grades, but not that bad). The report briefly notes that many of the Uyghurs who are being rounded up are caught because of their online activity opposing the program roundng them up.
Also the China-specific page: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/china
New York Times on censorship and young people in China: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/technology/china-generation-blocked-inter...
Internet users in China: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/08/23/china-now-boasts-more-... (this is a small sample of the crazy bad things that are happening)