A new study from the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs revealed how China censors and controls the flow of information on live streaming apps, the CBC reported.

To come up with the results, the research team headed by Masashi Crete-Nishihata, downloaded and reverse-engineered three of China's most popular live streaming apps, namely, YY, 9158, and Sina Show. They extracted nearly 19,500 keywords that prompted censorship within the platforms' chat features.

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The applications are embedded with a list of prohibited terms or keywords to filter the results. "If your message contains a keyword from the list then the message is not sent," the report said.

The list contains several keywords ranging from sexually implicit contents like "nude video chat" and terror-related words such as "improvised explosive devices" to politically sensitive terms including "Tiananmen Square massacre," the CBC News noted. Censorship is also reactive in response to current events.

However, researchers noted that the events are not equally censored and that the list of banned keywords vary among the three services, suggesting that private companies do not follow a centralized list from the government and that the government has no direct control on private firms.

"It's not practical for the government to control every aspect of censorship so they need the participation of the private system," Crete-Nishihata said, adding that the system is not a "top-down kind of control. It's much more distributed."

Furthermore, researchers also discovered that some cases include names of rivals, which appears to be triggered by business interests instead of purely government mandates. "What we're seeing is that censorship can be driven by multiple agendas," Crete-Nishihata noted. 

TagsInternet censorship, China Internet Censorship, China live streaming apps, YY, 9158, Sina Show, keywords