censorship. They created new accounts, posted different types of
content and tracked what got removed. As they pieced together the
censorship mechanisms, they discovered that criticism of leaders or
policies wasn’t blocked, but discussions of protests or rallies were.
Roberts would later divide online censorship strat egies into what she
calls the ‘three Fs’: flooding, fear, and friction. By flooding online
platforms with the opposing views, censors can drown out other
messages. The threat of repercussions for rule breaking leads to fear.
And removing or blocking content creates friction by slowing down
access to information.[93]
On my first trip to mainland China, I remember trying to connect to
WiFi when I arrived at my hotel. It took me a while to work out
whether I was actually online. All the apps I usually might load to
check my connection – Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter,
Facebook, Gmail – were blocked. As well as demonstrating the
power of the Chinese firewall, it made me realise how much influence
US technology firms have. The bulk of my online activity is in the
hands of just three companies.
We share a huge amount of information with such platforms.
Perhaps the best illustration of just how much data tech companies
can collect comes from a 2013 Facebook study.[94] They looked at
who had typed comments on the platform but never posted them. The
research team noted that the contents of the posts weren’t sent back
to Facebook’s servers, just a record of whether someone had started
typing. Maybe that was the case for this study. But regardless, it
shows the level of detail with which companies can track our online
behaviour and interactions. Or even, in this case, a lack of
interactions.
Given the power of our social media data, organisations can have
a lot to gain by accessing it. According to Carol Davidsen, who
worked on the Obama campaign in the 2012 US presidential election,
Facebook’s privacy settings at the time made it possible to download
the friendship network of everyone who’d agreed to support the
campaign on the platform. These friendship connections gave the
campaign a huge amount of information. ‘We were actually able to
ingest the entire social network of the US that’s on Facebook,’ she