Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media

By David Bamman, Brendan T. O'Connor, Noah A. Smith. First Monday, 2012

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With Twitter and Facebook blocked in China, the stream of information from Chinese domestic social media provides a case study of social media behavior under the influence of active censorship. While much work has looked at efforts to prevent access to information in China (including IP blocking of foreign Web sites or search engine filtering), we present here the first large–scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, i.e. , the active deletion of messages published by individuals. In a statistical analysis of 56 million messages (212,583 of which have been deleted out of 1.3 million checked, more than 16 percent) from the domestic Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, and 11 million Chinese–language messages from Twitter, we uncover a set a politically sensitive terms whose presence in a message leads to anomalously higher rates of deletion. We also note that the rate of message deletion is not uniform throughout the country, with messages originating in the outlying provinces of Tibet and Qinghai exhibiting much higher deletion rates than those from eastern areas like Beijing.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c23d25d45b6bf781df6e1975674489604e388e4

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Citations in the corpus

#thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities (2016, background): “Several studies have examined attributes and impacts of Chinese censorship on social media [3,17,22,25,28] or social media censorship more broadly [38].”
WeChat: social and political development of China’s dominant messaging app (2017, background): “” Other scholars, such as Cairncross (2001), McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002), and Amichai-Hamburger and Hayat (2011), disputed these findings and indicated that Internet usage can and does enhance the social lives of its users.”
Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda (2017, neutral): “[3] Bamman, David, Brendan OConnor, and Noah Smith.”
How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression (2013, background): “We begin with social media blogs in which it is at least possible for writers to express themselves fully, prior to possible censorship, and leaving to other research social media services that constrain authors to very short Twitter-like (weibo) posts (e.g., Bamman, O’Connor, and Smith 2012).”
On Predicting Deletions of Microblog Posts (2015, background): “For instance, some content may be removed by a third party due to a perceived violation of some law, regulation, or norm [1].”
Fairness for Unobserved Characteristics: Insights from Technological Impacts on Queer Communities (2021, background): “uncovered a set of charged political keywords present in posts with anomalously high deletion rates [14].”
Media Bias in China (2018, background): “A comparison between (4) and (5) reveals that L will launch a Commercial paper if the market expansion effect dominates the political cost.”
Five sources of bias in natural language processing (2021, background): “Some researchers have pointed out how NLP technologies can be used for harmful purposes, such as suppressing dissenters (Bamman et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2014), compromising privacy/anonymity (Coavoux et al., 2018; Grouin et al., 2015), or profiling (Jurgens et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2018).”
The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing (2016, background): “At the same time, NLP can also help uncovering such restrictions (Bamman et al., 2012).”