Mediaboss Marketing

26 March 2013 Last updated at 20:23 ET

You have written something politically sensitive on one of China's "weibo" microblogging sites. So how much time passes before it gets deleted? And what does it reveal about how Chinese censors work? Computer scientists Jed Crandall and Dan Wallach explain the findings of a study they conducted.

In China, internet penetration has grown massively in the last decade - from 4.6% in 2002 to 42.1% in 2012.

Microblogging site Sina Weibo only launched in 2010, but it now has 300 million users and about 100 million messages are sent daily. It clearly plays an important role in the discourse surrounding current events in China.

The Chinese government seems to require Chinese companies to maintain internal censorship regimes.

There have been several interesting studies on how Chinese censorship works and how to work around it, but we wanted to know how the censors do it and how they make their censorship scale to manage hundreds of millions of users.

We found a landscape in which a post could be deleted as quickly as five minutes after being put online and where the censors appear not to work a regular day, but seem to take a break when China's all-important 19:00 news comes on.

So how did we make such observations?

Last year - along with several colleagues - we spent 30 days observing 3,500 users on Sina Weibo to track the fate of their posts. During this time around 300 of the accounts were deleted - that's about 12% of the total. We further examined data about the posts and that provided some fascinating insights into how the censors go about their job.

We looked at users who have been censored and then see how long their to-be-censored posts survived. Those who are more often censored are also censored faster which shows they are getting more scrutiny than other users.

Read more:
The astonishing speed of Chinese censorship

ymca gym censorship workout no sun wed 20 mar 2013 George Godley Soho London U.K 00401
http://georgegodley.com/ http://www.youtube.com/geogodley https://twitter.com/geogodley https://www.facebook.com/pages/GeoGodley/213431738712281.

By: georgegodley

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ymca gym censorship workout no sun wed 20 mar 2013 George Godley Soho London U.K 00401 - Video

Post last. Welby meats Harrington. The video has finally emerged after severe censorship
via YouTube Capture.

By: Alana Harris

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Post last. Welby meats Harrington. The video has finally emerged after severe censorship - Video

A post at Anonnews.org, a website associated with hacktivist movement Anonymous, has called for a new 'Op', this time calling on Facebook users to protest against the social networking giants alleged censorship.

The group has called for a protest on 6 April, which the posting notes was the same date that Mahatma Gandhi defied the British to lead the Dandi Salt March in 1930 and when Egyptian activists planned a strike against the Egyptian government in 2008.

All anons worldwide hit Facebook with uncensored material. We shall continue this bombardment of material as long as we can - hopefully 24 hours, the call to action stated.

We will flood their system - their admins wont be able to keep up. They cant ban us all at once!

Some Facebook users have said they have been unfairly censored by the social network.

The Jeu de Paume museum was recently blocked from using Facebook for 24 hours after it posted a nude photograph of a woman as part of an exhibition on the French photographer Laure Albin Guillot. The photograph is still on Facebook but has been censored so that nudity is hidden from viewers.

The museum wrote on its Facebook page that it will no longer post nude photographs even if we believe that their artistic value is high, and that there is nothing pornographic about these photographs, which are in accordance with the right to publish contents of a personal nature.

Facebook says in its community standards that it respects peoples right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo's David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.

Another Facebook user who was allegedly recently censored after he posted a public document from Missouri Courts in the United States was blocked for using the site for seven days.

Isnt that nice of Facebook to block you from posting content, for merely sharing public information from Missouri Courts, the user said in a YouTube video.

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Anonymous to protest against Facebook censorship

Christian groups are complaining of "censorship" after the High Court upheld the Mayor of London's ban on a controversial bus advert suggesting gays can be helped to "move out of homosexuality".

A judge rejected accusations by Core Issues Trust, a Christian charity behind the ad, that Boris Johnson used his position as chairman of Transport for London (TfL) to obtain the ban in order to secure the gay vote and advance his 2012 re-election campaign.

Mrs Justice Lang, sitting at London's High Court, said: "In my view, such unlawfulness has not been established on the evidence."

But she gave the Trust permission to appeal because of the fundamental issues raised by the case over the right to freedom of expression. The ad posters earmarked for the sides of the capital's buses read: "Not Gay! Ex-Gay, Post-Gay and Proud. Get over it!"

The trust said they were in response to a bus poster campaign by gay rights group Stonewall, which carried the message: "Some people are gay. Get over it!"

Mr Johnson condemned the "gay cure" ad as "offensive to gays" and said it could lead to retaliation against the wider Christian community.

The trust, which says its works with gay people seeking to change their lifestyles but rejects the idea of offering a gay cure, argued its right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated by the ban.

The judge ruled the trust had been a victim of unfairness in the way the ban had been introduced in April last year. She said: "TfL's decision-making process fell below the standards to be expected of a responsible public body."

But the Trust's Article 10 rights were outweighed by the rights of gays to respect for their private and family life under article 8(1). The judge said TfL was legally justified in imposing the prohibition in the run-up to the mayoral elections in May 2012 because the ad would cause "grave offence" to gays and "increase the risk of prejudice and homophobic attacks."

At the same time TfL's interests "coincided with those of Mr Johnson, who also wished to avoid causing offence and avoid criticism which might damage his election campaign," and the judge said: "The overlap in interests did not render the decision unlawful."

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UK & World News: ' Censorship ' claims over gay ad ban