An Inside Look at China¡¯s Censorship Tools

[Randy W]

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An Inside Look at China’s Censorship Tools

 

 

from the WSJ

 

 

To get inside the system, professor Gary King and two Ph.D. students started their own fake social network over the past year, which—while it never formally went online—allowed them to reach out to some of China’s many companies offering censorship software. Their results, published this week, show the wide array of tools that social media companies like Sina Corp. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.can harness to control information as required by authorities.

 

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In Mr. King’s experience, the company recommended that his team hire two to three full-time censors for every 50,000 users. If that same formula was used at Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging platform, the company would employ somewhere between 2,160 and 3,240 censors to cover its 54 million daily active users.

In an interview, Mr. King said his exposure to the broad range of censorship software on the market suggests that China’s government is “allowing competition and innovation in censorship technology.”

 

“They have top-down control of outcomes, but not of the particular process. It’s not a bad strategy,” he said.

 

Mr. King’s findings closely mirror those of another study this year, which found that Sina’s censors are able to scrub sensitive content within just minutes of most postings. Still, he said, his research also illuminated the limitations of such technology.