Communications of the ACM
Study Shows Just How Fast Censorship Can Occur in Social Media
Credit: Rice University
Researchers at Rice University and the University of New Mexico have found that Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like Chinese social media service, uses a combination of keyword-matching software and human censors to monitor and delete potentially controversial posts on the site. By closely monitoring individuals who frequently post controversial messages, Sina Weibo is able to delete many objectionable posts in less than five minutes, according to the researchers.
The researchers started by following 25 "sensitive" users, and then added more than 3,000 users who had reposted one of the 25 sensitive users more than five times. Any user with more than five deleted posts was added to the pool of sensitive users. About 4,500 posts by the sensitive users were deleted each day, including about 1,500 that were deleted at the network level by Sina Weibo, according to the researchers.
"We have enough of these posts to be able to run topical analysis algorithms that let us extract the main subjects that Weibo's censors seemed concerned with on any given day," says Rice professor Dan Wallach.
From Rice University
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