PUBLISHED : Monday, 29 September, 2014, 2:09pm UPDATED : Monday, 29 September, 2014, 6:14pm
Riot police with shields guard a street in Admiralty around noon on Monday. Photo: David Wong
Censorship on Chinese social media has reached a new record this year as the mainland’s editors of public debate rushed to quell conversations on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
The number of Weibo posts that could not be accessed increased five-fold between Friday and Sunday, according to Weiboscope, a censorship monitoring project at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.
“It’s a new record,” said Dr Fu King-wa, the university’s scholar behind the project. “You can see that the keywords [in censored posts] such as ‘police’, ‘justice’, they are all linked to protest in Hong Kong.”
Fu’s software periodically checks a sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 Weibo users with large followings in search of deleted posts.
In the seven days up until Friday, he found that an average of about 32 messages had been deleted for every 10,000 posts.
On Saturday, when students staged a first protest, that number tripled to 98 posts.
On Sunday, when organisers declared the beginning of the Occupy Central civil disobedience movement, some 152 posts were deleted per 10,000 messages, about five times the preceding week’s average.
The hashtag Hong Kong was a leading trending topic on Weibo up until Monday, according to Weibo’s own data ranking. Access to posts with the hashtag was however blocked on Monday and the hashtag was later removed from its rankings.
Some users complained they could not share Weibo posts that mentioned Hong Kong’s protests.
Protesters in Hong Kong on Sunday night.
Weibo allowed for moderated searches on Hong Kong, which pointed to posts critical that were critical of the democracy movement and unrelated entertainment news.
On Sunday, Weibo restricted its rein on the debate and began censoring search results for “Hong Kong police” and “Hong Kong tear gas”. It had already censored “class boycott” when students announced their strike earlier in the week.
By Monday, FreeWeibo, a website that captures deleted Weibo posts, suggested that Hong Kong and Occupy Central were leading search topics on Chinese social media.
