Title: Social Media Surveillance | Freedom House
Headings: Social Media Surveillance
Social Media Surveillance
Freedom on the Net 2019 Key Finding: Governments harness big data for social media surveillance
A shift to machine-driven monitoring of the public
The global market for surveillance
In strong democracies, new tools of potential repression
The consequences of government intrusion into the digital public square
Protecting human rights in the age of AI surveillance
Freedom on the Net 2019: The Crisis of Social Media
Digital Election Interference
Explore Countries

Content: China is a leader in developing, employing, and exporting social media surveillance tools. The Chinese firm Semptian has touted its Aegis surveillance system as providing “a full view to the virtual world” with the capacity to “store and analyze unlimited data.” The company claims to be monitoring over 200 million individuals in China—a quarter of the country’s internet users. The company even markets a “national firewall” product, mimicking the so-called Great Firewall that controls internet traffic in China. Chinese agencies work closely with leading companies to monitor individuals online. A security researcher discovered an unsecured database consisting of the social media profiles, messages, and shared files of some 364 million Chinese users, updated daily, for manual tracking by law enforcement. A complex web of regulations gives the Chinese state access to user content and metadata, allowing authorities to more easily identify and reprimand users who share sensitive content. In March 2019, for example, it was reported that a member of Xinjiang’s persecuted Uighur Muslim minority population was detained and interrogated for three days because someone on his WeChat contact list had “checked in” from Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Further, several provincial governments in China are reportedly developing a “Police Cloud” system to aggregate data from users’ social media accounts, telecoms records, and e-commerce activity, as well as biometric data and video surveillance footage. The big data policing system can target individuals for interacting with “persons of concern” or for belonging to “certain ethnicities,” a euphemism applying to the Uighur Muslim minority.