Chinese social media platforms detect and downweigh accounts that over-use the reporting function, reducing their future report credibility. The CAO's counter-response was to recruit 'fresh accounts' from visitors, borrow civilian accounts from seconded staff, and store credentials in an unencrypted Excel file circulated via WeChat — indicating the censor relies on high account turnover rather than persistent infrastructure to maintain reporting effectiveness.

China's local censorship operates through 'extra-institutional governance' (EIG) — practices that transgress the official identity and authorized means of the CAO system, including outsourced private surveillance, unpaid personnel secondment, and mass reporting via personal accounts — which upper-level offices tolerate but do not formally authorize, preserving plausible deniability when practices are ethically or legally questionable. The paper documents these as widespread implicit norms across China, not isolated to District T.

§Discussion and Conclusion policy

A county-level CAO in east China (District T, ~500,000 residents) operated with only 7 formal employees yet was tasked with monitoring more than 60 social media platforms, detecting unwanted voices in text, image, video, and audio formats, and submitting hourly reports to upper-level offices — a workload the authors characterize as a 'mission impossible' for a county-level office.

§The case: the CAO in District T deployment

The District T CAO's 'Cavalry Team' of approximately 100 members used coordinated mass reporting — timing reports within 5–10 minutes of a post appearing, using different IP addresses and devices, and submitting long complaints invoking phrases like 'threatening social stability' — to achieve a documented weekly takedown success rate of 95.01% (286 of 301 targeted posts removed).

§Coping strategy 2: organized mass reporting evaluation

The District T CAO outsourced surveillance to a commercial SaaS platform ('Public Opinion Assistant') capable of scanning 180 million social media posts per day, processing 20 million posts per minute, and using supervised learning to classify 'negative voices' with performance comparable to human moderators. The platform generates ready-to-submit bureaucratic reports and maintains localized keyword lists that include euphemisms and homophones of censored terms as netizens update evasion strategies.

§Coping strategy 1: outsourcing surveillance to private service providers deployment

During the June 2025 shutdown, Iranian authorities blocked international One-Time Password (OTP) SMS delivery, preventing new sign-ins to foreign secure-messaging platforms and VPN services. This forced users toward government-approved domestic platforms that lack security and privacy protections. The blockade of OTPs effectively weaponized account-recovery flows as a secondary shutdown layer, disproportionately affecting users who needed to activate new circumvention tools during the crisis.

2025-iran-shutdown-measurement §Human Rights Implications port-blockingdpikeyword-filtering

Simple character-level perturbations (English) and homophone substitutions (Chinese), combined with LLM instruction-following prompts directing the model to use word substitutions in its output, successfully bypassed all input and output filters for all 41 input-blocked and 197 output-blocked queries across five major Chinese LLM services (Baidu-Chat, DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi, Qwen). Every input-blocked query contained at least one keyword combination that alone triggered the filter, confirming keyword-matching rather than semantic classification.

2026-ablove-characterizing §VII-D keyword-filtering

Cross-national experiments conducted from Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan during February 19–24, 2025 found no variance in blocking implementations, event syntax, or server infrastructure across all five Chinese LLM services. Input blocking was enacted identically in all three international locations, and services connected to the exact same server IP addresses globally — Kimi and Baidu-Chat connected to identical IPs and DeepSeek to the same two addresses across all tested locations.

2026-ablove-characterizing §VIII-A keyword-filtering

Input blocking in Chinese LLM services (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Doubao) is overwhelmingly consistent: all four services persistently block the exact same queries across all 5 measurement samples in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Output blocking is far less consistent, with only 29 out of 349 output-blocked queries blocked across all 5 samples. Baidu-Chat is exceptional: it performs almost no input blocking but instead relies heavily on post-search and output blocking (78.6% of blocks are output-phase).

2026-ablove-characterizing §VI-B keyword-filteringdpi

DeepSeek, Kimi, and Doubao all transmit analytics logs to the same Autonomous System (AS24429, Zhejiang Taobao Network Co., Ltd., a ByteDance/Volcengine subsidiary), with one monitoring endpoint IP directly overlapping between DeepSeek and Doubao. Additionally, all four non-Qwen services maintain connections with servers physically located in China throughout the chat session, transmitting user IDs, session IDs, viewport data, language preferences, and in Baidu-Chat's case, the full query text via URL-encoded CAPTCHA requests.

2026-ablove-characterizing §VI-D keyword-filtering

All five Chinese LLM services transmit partial or complete responses to the client machine even when output blocking is triggered, representing a major information leak. For DeepSeek and Qwen, truncated blocked responses are on average close in token length to full successful responses. For Baidu-Chat, the complete response is transmitted to the client but only partially rendered in the browser UI, with only a word or two visible on screen.

2026-ablove-characterizing §VI-C keyword-filtering