Title
Tracking and Quantifying Censorship on a Chinese Microblogging Site
Abstract
We present measurements and analysis of censorship on Weibo, a popular microblogging site in China. Since we were limited in the rate at which we could download posts, we identified users likely to participate in sensitive topics and recursively followed their social contacts. We also leveraged new natural language processing techniques to pick out trending topics despite the use of neologisms, named entities, and informal language usage in Chinese social media. We found that Weibo dynamically adapts to the changing interests of its users through multiple layers of filtering. The filtering includes both retroactively searching posts by keyword or repost links to delete them, and rejecting posts as they are posted. The trend of sensitive topics is short-lived, suggesting that the censorship is effective in stopping the "viral" spread of sensitive issues. We also give evidence that sensitive topics in Weibo only scarcely propagate beyond a core of sensitive posters.
Year
Venue
Field
2012
arXiv: Information Retrieval
Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Social media,Information retrieval,Censorship,Computer science,Microblogging,Download,Recursion
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1211.6166
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.45
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tao Zhu15812.63
David Phipps230.45
Adam Pridgen31118.00
Jedidiah R. Crandall450853.67
Dan Wallach52718300.11