What Is Private Networking?

Private networking sites refer to sites that allow individuals or groups to leverage knowledge and experiences of people in a network privately. While social networking sites have allowed individuals or groups to socialize and intersect with people and content online openly, private networking sites have allowed for the privatization of socialization and online content. Some of the chat apps that we studied in this report have public and private features. For example, WeChat is searchable, but many reporters mentioned difficulty accessing certain private groups. In a sense, private networking sites such as WeChat or Telegram could transform newsgathering. This section explores two important dimensions of private networking that came up in our interviews: the possibility for journalists to gain trust and circumvent censorship, and the emergence of the role of the digital fixer.

Journalistic Uses of Chat Apps Under Censorship and Surveillance

In our interviews, we found that, unlike social networking sites, chat apps provide means for reporters to circumvent government censorship and surveillance. When reporting with chat apps under conditions of political unrest, savvy journalists familiarized themselves with apps’ privacy and security features, and stayed current with these chat apps’ evolving functionalities. Changing features can lead to enhanced or reduced levels of privacy. Journalists said they must accommodate sources’ varying familiarity with specific apps.

One journalist warned about the risks of reporting with chat apps: “I think people don’t really have a sense of the danger out there, the security issues associated with these apps. Although there have been more people who turned to Telegram, or even some people turning to CryptoCat, or other encrypted methods, most people stick to WhatsApp for everything.”⁵² We found journalists who tried to take a conversation offline to protect sources and data by meeting in person or switching to an encrypted channel. But these moves (specifically the latter) can make the source nervous and may reduce their willingness to continue the conversation, especially about sensitive subjects (for sources not already aware of the likely level of surveillance on less secure channels). Journalists told us that, to some less sophisticated sources, the mere mention of encrypted channels can seem like an escalation and may cause the source to lose trust in the journalist or withhold information they may have been willing to provide. For sources with low technical skills, encrypted channels may involve onerous work. Sources may need to download and install additional software, possibly purchase new hardware, learn an interface, and invest considerable time and effort in the process.

Journalists noted that the choice of channel for communication with sources can be complex and depends on the source. An American print journalist working in mainland China told us:

If [a source] is on WeChat, which he probably will be, he’ll say, “Here’s my WeChat, let’s talk.” And so you talk to him a little bit, and then if he’s saying stuff that you’re pretty sure is problematic, you might bring it up and say, “Hey, do you have other apps? Maybe it would be better to, like, meet in person, you know, talk over the phone or something like that.” And you kind of get the sense of how paranoid that person is and how much they want to protect things. And you can push them. I usually give them a couple of different options . . . A lot of times people aren’t necessarily sophisticated enough or just don’t care, and then there’s people who are …You’re either paranoid or you’re not.⁵³

Journalists interviewed noted that some sources involved in political protests are inexperienced and unaware of the extent of surveillance on chat apps.

They likewise reported that, if a conversation is progressing well, sources may be reluctant to shift to an encrypted channel for reasons of user preference, thereby increasing potential exposure to surveillance. Indeed, some sources may want to intentionally keep the conversation open to surveillance, to demonstrate to the authorities that despite their conversations with foreign journalists they are not engaging in substantive activities offensive to the government. By remaining in the open, some sources believe that they are marking themselves as “working within the system,” thereby decreasing the likelihood that they will encounter trouble from the government. In response to the dilemmas surveillance poses for users, WhatsApp has implemented end-to-end encryption for its more than one billion accounts, starting in April of 2016. Since August 2016, WhatsApp users now have to opt out of WhatsApp sharing data with Facebook. However, even heavily encrypted communications may be surveilled if either end-user device is compromised.

We also found that journalists calibrate their choice of chat app according to privacy needs. One investigative reporter used WeChat as a starting point for conversations, but preferred to move the discussion to Tencent QQ, a Chinese messaging app, because it offers fewer ways to track users than WeChat does: “QQ is also a sort of instant messaging service. It’s even more anonymous than WeChat, because with a WeChat account my phone number’s tied to that account. Whereas with QQ you can set it up through an email address, so you can create an anonymous email, and then create your own QQ address. You do it online, on a computer to chat with people, or on your phone.”⁵⁴ In China, more common than QQ was Telegram, which served as an encrypted channel for protest organizers’ internal deliberations, as well as a secure space for journalists to source stories. In some cases, journalists removed certain unencrypted chat apps from their phones and relied exclusively on secure channels.

Sometimes the surveillance possibilities of chat apps led journalists to turn down potentially useful sources, as a reporter working for a European media outlet told us. For journalists in large news organizations, institutional rules often determined what technology they had access to and were familiar with using. The reporter said: “My company requires that my phone and computer are encrypted . . . I use [encrypted email], but I haven’t had much success in trying to get any of my sources to use encrypted email. I also use RedPhone, encrypted calling, but that’s hard to get Chinese sources to use and it doesn’t work well if the Wi-Fi is not very strong.”⁵⁵

We sometimes hear “chat apps” as a category, but these more specialized tools differ in a number of important respects. For example, they have varying types and levels of security, and these can have significant effects on journalists’ efforts to protect sources and the information they provide. Journalists also need to understand the level of openness in a given chat app, such as whether it is relatively narrow and private, or wide open. And they need to know who owns the data on the platform and what the terms of service say about possible uses of that data. Tech-savviness is uneven among journalists, but through word of mouth, trial and error, and, in some cases, training from employers, journalists gained a sense of which apps were secure and how to use these apps.

In addition to needing to master the functionalities, security features, language, and culture of chat apps, reporters told us they must also contend with the hardware challenges of heavy mobile phone use. A common complaint from journalists was the need to have backup battery packs on hand when reporting from protest sites. Since power sources were sometimes difficult to find, reporters learned to bring multiple battery packs and sometimes multiple phones. Another problem was with connectivity, since the size of the protests often meant that cellular data transmission slowed or stopped. As one reporter said: “We had many technology woes because there were so many people that the network wasn’t working. If I knew this, I would have prepared beforehand by setting up a portable Wi-Fi hotspot. I would have been able to connect anywhere instead of having to run away from the crowd to do work.”⁵⁶

As Hong Kong’s 2014 protests grew in size and chat apps became the targets of hacking, surveillance, and misinformation, activists crowdsourced solutions to security problems. One stringer said:

[One student group] was getting hacked all the time. [The group’s leader] would often post a screen grab of a message that says someone has tried to enter your account or something. It tells you when someone’s tried to access your account. Then I would see him ask people in the hacking community, “Can someone help me run through this and see what’s happened?” There’s a good solid community here, like pro-democracy tech activists who will help and jump to anyone’s rescue if they have these sorts of tech problems.⁵⁷

As a result, the private nature of chat apps led to the rise of “digital fixers,” reporters that were able to swiftly navigate the complex information on chat apps and provide guidance and potential access to those who knew less about how to gain access to information on those sites.

The Digital Fixer

“When you are writing in a new context and location, you work with a fixer who understands that context,” said An Xiao Mina at the 2016 International Journalism Festival in Perugia.⁵⁸ “They might be a journalist or researcher themselves, and theoretically we can apply this to the digital context. That there are digital fixers embedded in digital communities who can introduce you to the local culture.” The concept of the digital fixer points to the challenge of sourcing on closed networking sites such as WhatsApp, WeChat, or KakaoTalk. How reporters discover the news when sites or communities on these sites are closed was a recurring question in our interviews, particularly when established journalists talked about “parachute journalists,” or reporters who had little knowledge of local languages.

Reporters commonly fly in from other places to report in sites of political unrest. Since the events are often fast moving, reporters turn to chat apps to understand the issues at stake, identify sources, acquire content for stories, and check for the latest updates from the different groups involved. Long-term resident journalists in zones of protest noted that so-called “parachute journalists” could be over-reliant on chat apps as a collective approach to newsgathering.

Many journalists noted language barriers in using chat apps. Despite apps’ facility in transmitting photos and videos, chat apps are language-intensive and require journalists to have a detailed understanding of formal and informal aspects of a given language (and often, more than one language). To use a chat app well, journalists need to know regional and local slang, and keep track of an ever-changing set of abbreviations and expressions, which are sometimes specific to a platform. During political unrest, journalists told us that the challenge is evermore present. Protesting is a public act, but participants want to know who is on their side and who is on the other side(s). Journalists observed that protesters rely on subtleties of language to distinguish between allies and adversaries. Because protesters knew that political adversaries, police, and government agencies would watch much of their communication, they also used codes and deliberate misspellings of words to create uncertainty and confusion among outsiders.

In the case of the 2014 Hong Kong protests, protesters intentionally used local idioms that would be challenging for malicious outsiders, even other Chinese, who tried to gain access to closed groups on chat apps. This included not just the traditional Chinese characters that are common to Hong Kong’s Cantonese, but also combinations of characters that carried specific local meanings. This complexity posed challenges for the many journalists who sought to follow, understand, and report on the fast-moving conversations on chat apps. One interviewee wanted to report on a major protest march starting in Hong Kong’s central business district, but misread the details (written in colloquial Cantonese-style Chinese, substantially variant from standard Chinese) on WhatsApp. Although this journalist spoke good Mandarin Chinese, he found himself in the wrong place when the protest began. If an experienced Mandarin-speaking journalist can make this mistake, imagine the difficulty that journalists covering fast-moving chats full of slang on multiple platforms simultaneously face.