China's Dirty Web: Inside the country's 4chan-like doxing sites - SupChina
You’ve likely not heard of Zhina Wiki, Esu Wiki, or a slew of other 4chan-like forums in China that were recently forced to shut down. That’s because these were virtual meeting places for the country’s worst online citizens, characterized by harassment and rampant doxing (most notoriously of the...
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R>doxed a friend of barack obama
>got a artist arrested and put in a detention facility
>follow an anti globalist Christian guy called Liu Zhongjing
>harrased numerous targets and doxed their families
>has hacked into the chinese gov database just to try and get info on said families
>has done several flood campaigns on several websites
>made several people go into detention facilities
>They dislike leftist retards
>Had a 2016 battle of memes which had targets that included Taiwan sovereigntists and pop stars
>organised a flood team again, in order to flood the Facebook pages of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs
>joined forces with the Hong Kong government and did various counteractions to 2019 Hong Kong protests
>Some of the sites got taken down for their doxing
>2 teens got arrested for browsing the imageboards
>Memed President Xi Jinping as Hitler.
Two Chinese websites notorious for memes, doxing, and harassment have recently been shuttered by authorities in what appears to be a coordinated crackdown.
News spread on October 28 of the arrest of several young Chinese netizens. Esu Wiki 恶俗维基 was cited by name in reporting, including in a now-deleted post on The Beijing News’s website headlined, “15-year-old male in Chengde, Hebei ordered by Public Security officials to undergo criticism and education for multiple visits to anti-China website” (河北承德15岁男生多次上网浏览反华信息被公安批评教育 Héběi Chéngdé 15 suì nánshēng duōcì shàngwǎng liúlǎn fǎnhuá xìnxī bèi Gōng’ān pīpíng jiàoyù).
What kind of content, exactly, were these sites serving up to warrant a multi-agency strike campaign? What kind of people were behind these sites, and what were their motivations?
Rather than a black-and-white parable of censorship and top-down direction of online political struggles, we have a more confusing set of stories: strict state controls on the internet running up against Wild West commercialization, the shaky collusion between the state security apparatus and a small group of tech companies building a massive reservoir of data that neither side can seem to keep secure, grassroots nationalists who flout the law to carry out online political campaigns, and the proliferation of groups that challenge the leadership of the Party but also reject liberal democracy.
The two wiki-based sites, Zhina Wiki and Esu Wiki — and sister sites such as EXOZ Star Wiki (EXOZ明星维基 míngxīng wéijī) and Esu Gou Wiki (恶俗狗维基 èsúgǒu wéijī) — were conceived as something of an Encyclopedia Dramatica for the Chinese internet, a wiki for internet subcultures, memes, and web celebrities. But they grew into something far darker, taking advantage of lax corporate and government data security to furnish materials for doxing and harassment campaigns.
Esu Wiki, the first of the two sites to appear, grew from the popular Di Bar 帝吧 (dìbā) subforum on the Bǎidù Tiēba 百度贴吧 message board. Originally a forum to circulate memes about footballer Li Yi, it became a hotbed of aggressive memeing and Chinese nationalism.
Li Yi Bar was open in the year 2004, originally for ridiculing the soccer player Li Yi. He has a nickname Imperator Li Yi the Great , or "Da Di" for short, so the Li Yi Bar is nicknamed "Di Bar", "D8", etc, and it is also nicknamed "the Louvre of Baidu" Because this subforum has a large number of followers and its followers often flood forums, it gets the title "whenever Di Bar sends expeditionary force, not even a blade of grass can be alive".
Incidents:
July 29 flood event
On 28 July 2013 to 29 July 2013, there was a large flood on Baidu Tieba. On 28 July 2013, a Tencent Weibo user named Pan Mengying insulted some famous soccer players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, etc, and showed no respect on soccer, which angered many Chinese fans of Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona, which escalates their conflicts and therefore those angry fans decided to flood the over 20 subforums of the Baidu Tieba forum at 8:00 PM. Because the larger and larger population joined this flood event, it inflamed the anger at Chinese fans of Korean stars, and resulted in the participation of the followers of Li Yi Bar and WOW Bar. On the evening of 28 July 2013, the flood went to the climax. Billions of spams were posted in dozens of subforums of Baidu Tieba.
2016 Chinese meme war on Facebook
In January 2016, a Sina Weibo user organized a flood team from Li Yi Bar, whose mission was to flood Tsai Ing-wen's Facebook pages under the theme of anti-Taiwan independence. At 19:00 on 20 January 2016, the flood started. The Facebook pages of Tsai Ing-wen, Apple Daily, SET News were seriously flooded and therefore they had to ban comments in order to stop the message flood attack. During this event, the Facebook pages were flooded by billions of meme pictures and stickers, and therefore it was called meme war on Facebook.
2018 flood on the Facebook pages of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden
On 24 September 2018, the followers of Li Yi Bar organized a flood team again, in order to flood the Facebook pages of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Facebook pages of Swedish televisions, and the Facebook pages of Jesper Rönndahl. Those spammers sent myriads of comments and swear words on those Facebook pages. There were more than ten thousand comments on Jesper Rönndahl's Facebook pages, and most of them were deleted after a period of time.
Counteractions to 2019 Hong Kong protests
On 21 July 2019, to join forces with the Hong Kong government and the police force in the anti-extradition bill protest, the followers claimed that a flood will be initiated on 23 July 2019 at 20:00. Their targets could include Facebook or LIHKG. However, the operation started in advance on 22 July 2019, and Facebook pages of Civil Human Rights Front and Hong Kong National Front are flooded. Very soon, some core members were doxed. The disclosed personal information is detailed enough to be used to send application forms to the People's Liberation Army. On the same day, an admin of Li Yi Bar called off the operation "to prevent disturbing the normality of life of Hong Kong citizens."
Li Yi Bar - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The chūzhēng biǎoqíng 出征表情, or “battle memes,” of Di Bar might have gotten spicy at times, but the targets, which have included Taiwan sovereigntists and pop stars, were considered fair game. Content was otherwise relatively wholesome, often nationalistic, or arcane enough that nobody got their feelings hurt.
A censored example of memes featuring a target of online harassment.
The vile and vulgar memes of Di Bar and its offshoots will be familiar to readers of chan site imageboards, whether the Japanese originator 2ch or its Western copycats, 4chan and 8chan. Both make use of much of the same source material, too, relying heavily on manga, fascist imagery, and erotic fan art.
I asked an Esu contributor for the quintessential Esu meme, and her reply: Gong poems (龚诗 gōng shī) — doggerels written in a cod classical style that are basically incomprehensible.
Opaque to outsiders, hilarious to insiders, open to infinite modification, with origins in a harassment campaign: Indeed, the Gong poem has it all. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
Written by Esu users and attributed to a previous target of online harassment (the first two characters of his name, Gōng Shīfēng 龚诗峰, are “Gong poem”), deep knowledge of obscure slang and intertextual allusion is required to decode these “poems” — if decoding them is even possible, since a key element is attempting to pull meaning out of what seems to be nonsense.
Another early Esu contributor told me that Esu Wiki attracted a number of outcasts from other online communities, such as Liu Zhongjing fans, or people known as Yífěn 姨粉.
China's intellectual dark web, or zhīshifènzǐ ànwǎng 知识分子暗网, has been embraced by internet users — but there are plenty of homegrown figures whose popularity rivals that of Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris. Like their comrades on 4chan, Chinese internet users go looking for stronger stuff, too, and it often leads them to an intellectual and blogger by the name of Liú Zhòngjìng 刘仲敬, who made a name for himself in the early-2000s on social media platforms like Douban 豆瓣 and Zhihu 知乎 (China’s version of Quora). Like Sargon of Akkad or Black Pigeon Speaks, Liu lays a scholarly, scientific veil over ideas far more extreme than anything found in the mainstream.
Liu Zhongjing, arguably, is the forefather of the Chinese intellectual dark web, and currently its most notorious stalwart.
He is a radical online figure who prophesies a Great Flood that will lead to the de-Sinification of China and its replacement by dozens of smaller ethnostates.
He has built a name for himself by espousing aggressively anti-leftist and anti-progressive views. But he’s reserved his most controversial — and dangerous — opinions for the Chinese state itself: new regionalism, de-Sinification, and support of separatist movements like those in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
China’s intellectual dark web and its most active fanatic - SupChina
Liu Zhongjing, with his philosophy called “Auntology,” built a name for himself by espousing aggressively anti-leftist and anti-progressive views, becoming the forefather of what may well be termed China's "intellectual dark web" (borrowing the phrase coined in early 2018 by Eric Weinstein to...supchina.com
They were looking for harder stuff than boards like Di Bar could provide (Esu also hosted its own message boards). Since Esu Wiki was hosted outside of China and usually blocked on the mainland, it operated without the censorship that Di Bar was bound by and attracted users that were comfortable jumping the Great Firewall, or who had physically jumped the wall (a useful term: ròushēn fānqiáng 肉身翻墙, to physically make the leap outside of mainland control, rather than merely VPNing through).
With minimal restrictions on content and a new breed of user, it wasn’t long before Esu Wiki became a battleground for not only gleeful shitposting and memeing, but also for settling internecine feuds with humiliating doxing and humiliation campaigns.
Here, state power and the commercialization of the internet come together: Internet companies in China are collecting vast amounts of data, and much of that data ends up being handed over to the government.
Doxing is a tradition that goes back to at least the 18th century, when Voltaire made public Rousseau’s abandonment of his children, and was a common feature of early internet Usenet and IRC feuds.
A target of Esu Gou harassment, crudely pasted into a still from a Japanese news program about “net lynchings,” the Japanese version of the “human flesh search engine.”
Doxing takes on a different character in China, and consequences can be more severe.
The Human flesh search engine is a Chinese term for the phenomenon of distributed researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums. The Internet media-dedicated websites and Internet forums— are in fact platforms that enable the broadcast of request and action plans concerning human flesh search and that allow the sharing of online and offline search results. Human flesh search has two eminent characteristics. First, it involves strong offline elements including information acquisition through offline channels and other types of offline activism. Second, it always relies on voluntary crowd sourcing: Web users gather together to share information, conduct investigations, and perform other actions concerning people or events of common interest.
Human flesh search engine is similar to the concept of "doxing", a practice often associated with the social activist group Anonymous. Both human flesh search engine and doxing have generally been stigmatized as being for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals to public humiliation, sometimes out of vigilantism, nationalist or patriotic sentiments, or to break the Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China.More recent analyses, however, have shown that it is also used for a number of other reasons, including exposing government corruption, identifying hit and run drivers, and exposing scientific fraud, as well as for more "entertainment"-related items such as identifying people seen in pictures. A categorization of hundreds of Human flesh search (HFS) episodes can be found in the 2010 IEEE Computer Society paper A Study of the Human Flesh Search Engine: Crowd-Powered Expansion of Online Knowledge.
The system is based on massive human collaboration. The name refers both to the use of knowledge contributed by human beings through social networking, and to the fact that the searches are usually dedicated to finding the identity of a human being who has committed some sort of offense or social breach online. People conducting such research are commonly referred to collectively as "Human Flesh Search Engines".
Because of the convenient and efficient nature of information sharing in cyberspace, the Human Flesh Search is often used to acquire information usually difficult or impossible to find by other conventional means (such as a library or web search engines). Such information, once available, can be rapidly distributed to hundreds of websites, making it an extremely powerful mass medium.
Human flesh search engine - Wikipedia
A censored screenshot from Esu Gou showing leaked government database information about the father of a harassment target.
Maintaining anonymity in China is far more difficult than it is in the West.
The Chinese internet is a privacy nightmare. The real-name registration system, or shímíngzhì 实名制, was intended to civilize the Chinese internet, but it adds to the amount of data floating around in the backend of websites. The existence of centralized government databases, which hold identification cards and easily verifiable serial numbers and links to other data, makes it all the simpler to unravel the anonymity of netizens. Here, state power and the commercialization of the internet come together: Internet companies in China are collecting vast amounts of data, and much of that data ends up being handed over to the government.
The massive stores of data combined with loose regulations on data security mean that government agencies often have hackers reading chat logs over their shoulders. A 2016 report by Citizen Lab, for example, showed that Baidu software was leaving unencrypted personal data exposed. Just this year, unsecured servers opened up half a billion job-seekers’ resumes and e-commerce records to the open internet, and a database put together by state surveillance leaked online, making public “hundreds of millions of chat logs.”
Strict internet controls makes it, paradoxically, easier for truly vile content to exist on the Chinese internet. A Chinese porn site, for instance, since it is already outlawed, does not have much incentive to self-censor content such as photos of sexual assault or child pornography; a QQ group selling unapproved dietary pills does not have much incentive to crack down on vendors moving substituted cathinones or human growth hormone; and if a group is trading credit cards, there’s no particular reason they would turn their nose up at a leaked database from a local Public Security Bureau branch.
While sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwi Farms operate legally and can be policed by libel law and the threat of lawsuits, sites like Zhina operated outside the reach of law.
The loss of anonymity had dire consequences for Zhang. With no updates since her arrest, it is likely that she is still being held in a detention facility. The “elegant gentlemen” , as the site’s hackers call themselves, likely exploited lax privacy at web companies or leaked databases from government agencies to obtain Zhang’s information.
A screenshot of the frontpage of Zhina Wiki.
China's Dirty Web: Inside the country's 4chan-like doxing sites - SupChina
You’ve likely not heard of Zhina Wiki, Esu Wiki, or a slew of other 4chan-like forums in China that were recently forced to shut down. That’s because these were virtual meeting places for the country’s worst online citizens, characterized by harassment and rampant doxing (most notoriously of the...
supchina.com
China's Dirty Web: Inside the country's 4chan-like doxing sites - Sup…
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