A new anticensorship tool from GreatFire turns any website into an unblocked app in China

GreatFire’s new tool uses machine learning to let creators easily produce apps that make content accessible anywhere
The organisation has spent years helping users skirt China’s Great Firewall

Censorship in China

Masha Borak

Published: 2:30pm, 5 Aug 2020

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There are plenty of anticensorship tools designed to help people hop China’s Great Firewall. But a new one called the GreatFire AppMaker is designed specifically for content creators. The creators of the tool say it enables any blocked media outlet, blogger, human rights group or civil society organisation to get their content onto the phones of Chinese users.

The tool doesn’t just work for China, either. GreatFire, a group of activists who monitor censorship in China, says it also works in other countries where the content is blocked.

“At a time when governments are responding to censorship with censorship, this is a solution that we believe highlights what is most important – freedom of access to information,” said Charlie Smith, the head of the organisation.

The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system

Smith is a pseudonym that the activist has been using since the start of GreatFire’s battle with the Great Firewall in 2011. The non-profit organisation compiles a censorship database about blocked websites and searches in China. It also collects deleted posts from social platforms like Weibo and WeChat. Another anticensorship tool the organisation maintains is a web browser called FreeBrowser, which GreatFire said inspired AppMaker.

Like the browser and a New York Times app that GreatFire helped with, AppMaker relies on the concept of collateral freedom, Smith said. This works by hosting blocked content alongside other innocuous content on critical cloud services, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The idea is that China won’t block large swathes of those cloud providers just to keep out some offending content, because the cost would be too great.

Organisations that want to use AppMaker can go to the site, put in their blocked web address and upload an app icon. When they hit submit, the tool compiles an Android app that users can download with a QR code posted to GitHub. In line with the collateral freedom concept, China has been reluctant to block GitHub because the open source code depository is an irreplaceable tool for the local tech community.

After scanning the code, users get a link to an APK installation file for Android. The app that users get is effectively a web browser that automatically pulls up the specified website – now unblocked.

The tool is also supposed to be smart. GreatFire says AppMaker uses machine learning to skirt the sophisticated mechanisms that help the Great Firewall keep unwanted information outside China’s borders.

“The Chinese authorities are using machine learning in their approach to censorship,” Smith said, noting that manually designed algorithms have to be updated when China’s firewall rules change. “Unless anticensorship tools prepare, they will all be blocked sooner or later.”

The non-profit organisation Human Rights Foundation said in GreatFire’s announcement that it plans to take on China’s censorship “one phone at a time.” Image: GreatFire

The first organisation to take advantage of AppMaker is the Human Rights Foundation. We tested out the resulting app in mainland China and confirmed that the organisation’s content is accessible inside the Great Firewall.

People in China have long used other tools to get around censorship. Virtual private networks (VPNs) have typically been the preferred method, but more sophisticated tools designed specifically for the Great Firewall like Shadowsocks proxies have cropped up in recent years.

Things got more difficult in 2017 when China started requiring the makers of circumvention tools to officially register with the state. Since then, authorities have started purging unauthorised VPNs from app stores, handing out jail sentences to illegal operators and, more recently, punished users that hopped over the firewall.

Smith said this new solution means users no longer need to have the financial means to purchase a VPN or the technological means to set up a different anticensorship solution.

“We and others have shown that the Chinese censorship apparatus is not infallible,” Smith said. “Also, when it comes to expressing discontent in China, there is a real climate of fear. Few people speak up. We hope that this project provides a voice to the voiceless.”