Writing 'bass ackwards' to defeat censorship in China

Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.

"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.

This is a particularly clever solution in Chinese, which, because of its ideographic writing system, is probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages. One way to imagine this is to remember the English phrase "bass ackwards," a well-understood inversion. Because Chinese splits words into meaning-based units rendered in characters, reading reverse text is more akin to "bass ackwards" than to "sdrawkcab ssa." At least, I think so. We'd have to ask serious linguists to confirm my hunch.

Another circumvention method that has been in action for many years is to write the text and take a screenshot of it. Censors aren't very good at parsing text in a JPEG file.

I don't know whether this is the first time this tactic has been used, but it's one indication of the determination of some people in China to exchange information despite state efforts to control online communications.

[Harlan879]

Reading Chinese backwards would be like this, with the morpheme order reversed:

edreverse ememorph each with this like be would swardback eseChina ingread.

[Balfor]

Thank you -- I hadn't thought about using that trick. But it's too bad that the majority of comments boards would probably efusere otay ostpay my exttay :-(

[Wakule]

I'm not sure how well L33T would work for Chinese but it was an early way to defeat censorship.

[mravichandran]

tuabo mite meso did mesohting touab it.

[devananda_vdv]

In response to Harlan879's post, which is correct about the morpheme reversal, there's another facet of the language that would make it more difficult for censors to pick up on: there are no spaces to distinguish between words, and reversing the morpheme order could actually create other recognizable morphemes! For example, "I have not ridden the train" (wo mei zuo huoche) => "car fire sits without me" (che huo zuo mei wo). In Chinese it has a completely different meaning! While both reversed sentences sound like a non-native speaker said it (after all, car fires don't "sit"), I can easily see how this would defeat censors both human and computer.

[SFGUY999]

Shame on the IOC for selecting such a regime to host the Olympics! Myanmar next?

[AnthonyIac]

Censorship disgusts me. I guess they can always use Pig-Latin.

[pandapassport]

There's an interesting post on ifgogo blog on this: http://tinyurl.com/6g5ozt

Re substituting text with an image, check out Ryan's wordpress plugin "Censortive" which does exactly that.