IT’S a sneak peek behind the infamous “Great Firewall of China”. The way China censors politically sensitive terms on social networks has been laid bare for the first time.
As expected, any criticism of the state is swiftly removed. But Beijing’s censorship machine is also rather more subtle than you might think.
A team led by David Bamman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, downloaded nearly 57 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. They later checked Sina Weibo’s archive to see which messages had been deleted – and which terms they had in common.
The results, due…
