BBC Learning English
Words in the News
Monitoring microblogs
11 March 2013
Words in the News
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2013
Page 1 of 2
bbclearningenglish.com
If you write something politically sensitive on China's microblogs, or Weibo, how
quickly might it be deleted? Researchers in the United States have been looking
into the issue and found some surprising results. Viv Marsh reports for the BBC:
With more than half a billion Chinese online, and many of them avid
microbloggers, the speed of censorship uncovered on Sina Weibo is astonishing.
The researchers mined data on microblog comments removed by administrators,
and found that nearly a third of the deleted posts were taken down in the first 30
minutes.
Unsurprisingly, criticism of the government, local scandals and complaints about
China's one-child policy were blocked most quickly. But the team worked out that
if none of the process was automated, Sina Weibo would need to employ more
than 4,000 speed-reading censors a day, just to keep up.
The researchers uncovered a range of devices aimed at bringing bloggers into
line. They included: hiding posts from other users, flagging repeat offenders for
closer scrutiny, and tracking backwards to delete sensitive topics everywhere
they arose.
With China's media so strictly controlled, the study has raised questions about
why microblogs allow people to post before censorship at all. One of the
researchers, Professor Dan Wallach, told the BBC that Sina Weibo had to satisfy
government censorship requirements without seeming heavy-handed to its
bloggers. He said it had to walk a fine line.
