It is well established that China’s propaganda authorities employ a variety of techniques in attempting to control the spread of information on social networks, but a new study suggests the government’s last line of defense, an army of human censors who manually excise posts, is operating differently than previously thought.
Instead of simply censoring topics critical of the government or that make China look bad, the study finds, the country’s human censors specifically target posts that could lead to protests or other forms of collective action, leaving ample room for China’s web users to criticize its government.
The study, recently released by Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science also takes the first steps toward using censorship trends to predict the behavior of the Chinese government, examining cases in which major political events were preceded by drastic changes in censorship patterns.
Conducted by Harvard political scientist Gary King in conjunction with Ph.D. candidates Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts, the study focuses on longer form blogs and message boards, leaving aside China’s most popular Twitter-like microblog platforms, known as weibo. The findings nevertheless provide useful new insights both into the ways China censors information online and the relationship of that censorship to the government’s actions in the real world.
“This is an enormous program. Hundreds of thousands of people are involved to help the government keep secrets…and the interesting paradox is an enormous program like that, designed to keep people from seeing things, actually exposes itself,” Mr. King said in an interview. “An elephant leaves big footprints.”
Mr. King is quick to point out that the study, based on data collected by social media monitoring firm Crimson Hexagon, fails to look at what websites China blocks through the Internet filtering system widely known as the “Great Firewall” or at the many sensitive keywords censors use to control what Chinese users search for and post on social media sites.
