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If you wanted to learn more about Sina Weibo's censorship patterns, today is your lucky day. A group of computer scientists from Bowdoin College, Rice College, and the University of New Mexico have, along with an independent researcher, released the results of an academic study of Sina Weibo's censorship practices. The study, which we came across via MIT Technology Review, used "architecture [that could] detect post deletions within one minute of the deletion event," giving the researchers perhaps the most precise look yet into how quickly Sina's content team takes down sensitive Weibo posts. The results? Sina is pretty darn fast:

So Sina's censors are pretty fast. But what, exactly, are they deleting? Researchers used a variety of analytical tools to look at what content was most quickly deleted, and found that:

Researchers also found that, unsurprisingly, users with more total deleted posts tended to get their posts deleted more quickly than other users, suggesting that Sina's content team was watching their accounts more carefully. The following chart from the study shows the downward trend in post lifetime as a user's number of total deleted posts increases:

Of course, it's not all humans doing the deleting. In fact, by the study's estimations, for an all-human team to censor Weibo, 4,200 team members would be required, assuming each team member could read at the blazing rate of 50 posts per minute. The study points out that as a result of that, weibo's censorship system has become an incredibly complex system, employing both human and software censors, employing multiple blocked keyword lists that trigger different censorship responses, search filtration systems, and more. (Of course, none of that should come as much of a surprise to longtime weibo users, who have likely experienced many of the different types of censorship on Sina Weibo firsthand).

If you're really interested in Weibo censorship, the full paper is worth a read, and although it's a bit dry and quite technical in places, the good news is that it's only ten pages long.

(via MIT Technology Review)

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Censorship Alert! Academic Study Shows Sina Weibo's Human Censors Are Pretty Darn Fast

Censorship on Weibo, Chinas version of Twitter, is near real-time and relies on a workforce of over 4,000 censors who stop work during the evening news, according the first detailed analysis of censorship patterns.

The Chinese version of Twitter is a microblogging service called Weibo which launched in 2010. This allows users to post 140 character messages with @usernames and #hashtags, just like Twitter although 140 characters in Chinese contain significantly more information content than in English.

In just three years, Weibo has picked up some 300 million users who between them send 100 million messages each day at the rate of 70,000 per minute. That makes the inevitable process of censorship a tricky task for the Chinese authorities. So an interesting question is how they do it.

Today,Dan Wallach at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a few pals reveal the results of a detailed study of censorship on Weibo. Their method has allowed them to reconstruct the censorship techniques used by the government, to calculate the number of workers who must be involved and even to discover their daily work schedules.

The work is possible because at least some of the content on Weibo is not censored prior to publication, only afterwards. Their approach was to collect posts from a set of users once every minute. They then tracked these posts to see which ones later became unavailable.

Of course, its not feasible to track everyone on Weibo so Wallach and co spent some time looking for users who seemed to have posts deleted more often than others, assuming that these users would be more likely to be censored in the future. Using this manual technique, they ended up observing some 3500 users over a period of 15 days last year who between them experienced around 4500 deletions per day, or about 12 per cent of the total.

Not all deletions are the result of censorship, however, since a user can delete his or her own posts. Wallach and co say that through their own trial and error they observed two types of deletion which return different messages. When users delete their own messages, a query for the post returns a post does not exist error message.

However, when a post is deleted by the censors, Weibo returns a different message saying: permission denied. It is these second type of deletions that Wallach and co concentrated on.

The results of their study are fascinating. They say that in their data set about 5 per cent of the deletions occur within 8 minutes of posting and around 30 per cent within 0 minutes. In total, 90 per cent of deletions occur within a day, although at times deletions can occur several days later.

See the rest here:
Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China's Twitter

25 - Free Energy, 9/11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence
9/11 Finding The Truth by Andrew Johnson playlist - http://www.youtube.com Andrew Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com Individual audio files of the articles in Andrew Johnson #39;s book 9 Finding The Truth can be downloaded from Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com There are also many more related audios in the 9/11 archive on Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com Individual articles from 9/11 Finding The Truth can also be read on Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk There #39;s also a zip file for the entire book: Audio Book - 9-11 Finding the Truth.zip (296.4 MB) (Modified: Jan 20 2013 11:22:27 AM) Link to zip file - http://www.checktheevidence.com 9/11 Finding The Truth is also available in other formats for free from here - tinyurl.com --- This video is made from the audio entitled 25 - Free Energy, 9-11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence.mp3 (3.6 MB) (Modified: Sep 13 2012 07:26:49 PM) mp3 - http://www.checktheevidence.com Link to original article (April 18, 2009) - http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk --- What really happened on 9/11? What can the evidence tell us? Who is covering up the evidence, and why are they covering it up? This book attempts to give some answers to these questions and has been written by someone who has become deeply involved in research into what happened on 9/11. A study of the available evidence will challenge you and much of what you assumed to be true. "Now we are discovering that there is a highly ...

By: matrixcutter

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25 - Free Energy, 9/11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence - Video

Political Correctness is Censorship

By: W1NGXER0

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Political Correctness is Censorship - Video

Breaking Through Chinese State Censorship - Changchun Signal Interruption Remembered
Something unexpected happened in China #39;s Changchun city today mdash;on March 5th mdash;back in 2002. For forty minutes, the local state-run television #39;s programming was interrupted by this. The documentary, False Fire, disproved the self-immolation incident that was staged on Tiananmen Square a year earlier. Chinese state-run media claimed five Falun Gong practitioners had set themselves on fire. They broadcast the propaganda every evening to incite public hatred against the spiritual practice. It helped justify the Chinese Communist Party #39;s crackdown on the group since 1999. [Lan Lihua, Falun Gong Practitioner]: "I saw an article about a Falun Gong practitioner using television signal jamming technology to broadcast the persecution of Falun Gong to thousands of households. I thought this was a great way to get the message out." Like millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China, Lan Lihua was thinking of ways to break through the Chinese regime #39;s censorship. She connected two people she knew who would be able to take over the airwaves. After months of planning, on March 5th, Changchun residents watched on TV how Falun Gong was welcomed and practiced around the world. They saw how the Communist Party was lying to them. [Bill Xia, CEO, Dynamic Internet Technology]: "It represented Falun Gong practitioners #39; efforts to bring real information to the Chinese and for that particular event it was actually dramatic and had a big impact. In a few hours it reached millions of people" And that ...

By: NTDonChina

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Breaking Through Chinese State Censorship - Changchun Signal Interruption Remembered - Video