IT鈥橲 a sneak peek behind the infamous 鈥淕reat Firewall of China鈥�. The way China censors politically sensitive terms on social networks has been laid bare for the first time.
As expected, any criticism of the state is swiftly removed. But Beijing鈥檚 censorship machine is also rather more subtle than you might think.
A team led by David Bamman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, downloaded nearly 57 million messages from Sina Weibo, China鈥檚 version of Twitter. They later checked Sina Weibo鈥檚 archive to see which messages had been deleted 鈥� and which terms they had in common.
Advertisement
The results, due to appear in the journal First Monday, show that around 53 per cent of messages from Tibet, seen as a trouble spot, were deleted compared with just 11 per cent in Shanghai.
鈥淎round 53 per cent of messages from Tibet, which is seen as a trouble spot, were deleted鈥�
The censors occasionally did some good, however. When a false rumour started that eating iodised salt would protect people from radiation leaks after the Fukushima disaster, the censors simply deleted the messages.