The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions
Tao Zhu, David Phipps, Adam Pridgen, Jedidiah R. Crandall, Dan S., Wallach

TL;DR
This study quantifies the speed and scope of censorship on Chinese microblogging sites like Weibo, revealing rapid deletion times and topic-specific censorship patterns through large-scale data analysis.
Contribution
It provides high-fidelity measurements of censorship timing and mechanisms on Weibo, including the speed of deletions and topic-based censorship behaviors, using extensive data analysis.
Findings
Most deletions occur within the first hour of posting
Nearly 30% of deletions happen within 5-30 minutes
90% of deletions occur within 24 hours
Abstract
Weibo and other popular Chinese microblogging sites are well known for exercising internal censorship, to comply with Chinese government requirements. This research seeks to quantify the mechanisms of this censorship: how fast and how comprehensively posts are deleted.Our analysis considered 2.38 million posts gathered over roughly two months in 2012, with our attention focused on repeatedly visiting "sensitive" users. This gives us a view of censorship events within minutes of their occurrence, albeit at a cost of our data no longer representing a random sample of the general Weibo population. We also have a larger 470 million post sampling from Weibo's public timeline, taken over a longer time period, that is more representative of a random sample. We found that deletions happen most heavily in the first hour after a post has been submitted. Focusing on original posts, not…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Spam and Phishing Detection · Social Media and Politics
