By Star Chang, posted Mar 7, 2013 at 3:25 PM, 31 views, Chinese Human Censors are Super Fast on Deleting Posts on China Social Media
Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging web service, is the most influential and powerful social media platform in China. The service has seen tremendous growth since launching in 2010, with over 400 million registered users. This growth has forced the Chinese government and authorities to ramp up its censorship tactics, in order to control the freedom of speech. Researchers in the US have attempted to reveal the country?s operations, released the results of an academic study of Sina Weibo?s censorship practices. After following activity from 3,500 users over a 15-day period, they found that about 13 percent of all posts had been deleted. By the study?s estimations, for an all-human team to censor the post in Weibo, 4,200 team members would be required, assuming each team member could read at the blazing rate of 50 posts per minute ?
Some post had been deleted by users themselves because of controversy. Of course our interest lay in those erased by the censors team. According to the study, deletions happen most heavily in the first hour after a post has been submitted. Nearly 30 percent of the total deletion events occur within 5-30 minutes, and nearly 90 percent of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours. This would suggest the monitoring is almost in real-time. The topics where mass removal happens the fastest are those that combine events that are hot topics in Weibo as a whole with themes common to sensitive posts. For instance: content related to sex scandal, Beijing government and policeman, and the deletions are less frequent at night. Researchers also found that users with more total deleted posts tended to get their posts deleted more quickly too, suggesting that the censors team was watching on respective accounts more carefully.
It seems the censorship tactics over at Weibo is an incredibly complex system, US researchers have given us a fascinating study on it. SINA will continue to cooperate with Chinese government, by employing more censors and create a perfect multiple blocked keyword lists to meet different censorship responses. They will be screening out even more information and disseminate unwelcome news. Sina Weibo is planning to reach out international audiences by offering an English-language interface, we are wondering how the Chinese social media giant going to cope with oversea user.
SOURCE: MIT Technology Review via The Verge
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/micgadget/~3/nnq4ClhMMMs/
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