Research on Chinese Social Media
Censorship as Contemporary Archaeology
Notes on Time-Sensitivity

Joshua Cader*This essay considers a selection of English-

sophistication of censorship technology andlanguage work examining censorship on Sinastrategy. We will see that when the platform

Weibo at peak platform vitality. The goal isbecame moribund, research consequently

to see how Chinese social media censorshipshifted away from political topics towards

and the research examining it evolved

use of the platform as mere corpus. I thenin tandem, this evolution being largely

end by suggesting uses for such a platform

determined by shifts in usage patterns spedas the subject of political research.

up by network effects and the increasing

The Rise of Sina Weibo and Soft Censorship
The first article of note on Sina Weibo
1

3

friction, and the literature indicates thatwas Bamman et al., appearing in early 2012.

when applied to the general population, thisWork before the study’s appearance largely

is a suboptimal strategy. For example, in anconcentrated on the prevention of access toexperimental setting, Chinese undergraduate-

information, “including IP blocking of foreign

age subjects responded to overt censorshipwebsites or search engine filtering”, and itof blog posts by choosing to read similar

represents the “first large-scale analysis ofposts next rather than avoiding a sensitive

political content censorship in social media”.

topic altogether. Conversely, censorship ofWhile IP filtering

2

4

5

is useful to the stateblog posts on a sensitive topic (here, Tibetan

when the target of censorship is beyond its

self-immolations) that simply erases the post

jurisdiction or the state does not have thewith no trace makes posts from others lessresources to set up a more costly system, thelikely. As an objection to such arguments,

censorship performed by IP filtering is rather

one could say that reading is a low-risk“hard”. That is, it relies on fear rather thanactivity, while posting is high-risk. However,6* Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo
キーワード：Weibo, social media, internet, censorship, China, politics, information friction, platform migration71

in a study of bloggers cited in the same7

reasons for the block are not described, inmanuscript, being censored does not make itmost cases they are somewhat boring and,either more or less likely that they will post

perhaps more importantly, idiosyncratic.

again on the same topic. So, fear is inert, at

This means that less obvious trends cannot

least at the “typical” producer and consumer

really be established by means of automatedlevel examined, whereas friction works. Of

analysis, which is the weapon of choicecourse the relative importance of the typicalof Internet researchers. Some popularuser for setting the agenda of discussion

pornography portals are blocked, some areis up for debate, and it is likely that thenot, and some are blocked part of the time.

study’s findings do not hold for power-

If a news website speaks ill of a Chinese

users. This will be discussed later. For now,leader loudly enough, they will be blocked

I note that the use of particularly “hard”– Bloomberg.com being a particularly stark

censorship, such as IP filtering, has become

example, blocked consistently since Junea less important part of the censorship2012 when it ran a major story exposing theequation in China, while remaining theproperty holdings of Xi Jinping’s family. The

solution of choice, if not the only solution, in

New York Times is always blocked. Thus thecountries with less inclination or ability toacademic action on the Chinese censorshipspend scarce resources on making censorship

front is elsewhere – at the user level, which“soft”, with mixed results.

8

can be researched by looking at the patterns

This is not to say that websites are no

visible in the massive number of traces left

longer blocked in China, but that to use

by users on social media. At the height ofth e me r e f a c t a s a su b j e c t o f re se a r c h

the “big data”

is uninteresting for two reasons: it

choice was indisputably Sina Weibo. Earlier

isn’t new, and understanding of it is fairly

microblog services had been shut down attransparent. Any visitor to Greatfire.org

the time of the 2009 Urumqi riots (which

can find out which websites have been

also led to the DNS blocks of Facebook

blocked and when, with archives of tests ofand Twitter). Sina Weibo was the outlet of9

DNS blocks (as well as URL redirections )choice among the new microblogs that took

dating back, in many cases, to 2011. This istheir place, which were in turn the method

accompanied by extensive test data, whichof expression most likely to have collective

is particularly useful when the website

action potential.

10

hype in 2012, the platform of

11

in question is blocked in a different form

Bamman et al. seeks to uncover “thethan the standard DNS block. Although theterms whose presence in a message leads

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to anomalously higher rates of deletion”

of producing an error indicating that theby using Chinese-language Twitter (which

search term is objectionable.

consists of both mainland-resident VPN

this in progress – after finding an interestingusers as well as overseas Chinese) as “ansituation where no results were returned

uncensored stream for contrast”. The

in a keyword search modified by theblocking of search terms is also examined

imposition of a twenty-four-hour window and– an example of a more primitive, “hard”

performing this exact search multiple times,

censorship in action. This can be seen as a

the search ended up being altered threetransitional piece. The term searched fordays later to display ten posts rather thanby Bamman et al. – 刘晓波 (Liu Xiaobo) –zero, or the thousands that would have been

is of course said by them to be blocked, or

returned if unmanipulated.

more specifically “self-censored” (that is, by

not desperate to see something in particular,

Sina themselves: searching yields a message

such manipulated searches do not elicit the

explaining that results cannot be shown

same fear as being told in stark terms that

due to “relevant laws”), and my own tests

one is searching for something illegal, but

years later yield the same result. However

does create the desired information-slowing

a cursory look on Greatfire.org indicates

friction.

13

12

I have seen

For the userthat a search for Liu Xiaobo on Weibo had

Some of Bamman et al.’s findings are

been sporadically possible from late 2013 toobvious: some keywords are sensitive all thelate 2014 (this conveniently right after thetime; some are sensitive due to a current

end of the government campaign that would

event. However, the finding that a post’s

bring about the end of Weibo as cutting

being rebroadcast or the poster having aedge, see below). Thus Roberts’ pointing

large number of followers does not make it

towards the greater usefulness of “soft”

more likely that a comment will be deleted

censorship (“friction”) over hard (“fear”)

is surprising, although there may be multiple

can be said to be understood by those ininternal variables working at cross-purposescharge of Chinese social media censorship

here: deleting such tweets may make

implementation, as softness temporarily

censorship more obvious, and thus “hard”,

increased. It should be specified that while

making deletion less likely. Also, those withsometimes a sensitive search is possible,

many followers may be more circumspect in

the results are manipulated. Roberts writes

their usage of offending terms (with powerthat search filtering is now producing acomes responsibility), and therefore theirlist of unobjectionable websites, instead

posts may be less incendiary. On the otherResearch on Chinese Social Media Censorship as Contemporary Archaeology

73

hand, the ability of such posts to spreadwork, which found censorship concentration

outward from a trusted source may makeat the time of “volume bursts”, hypothesized

the censors more likely to want to nip

to be for collective action prevention.

such activity in the bud. Perhaps the mostet al. also asserts that there is a filteringinteresting finding of Bamman et al. is thatsystem for incoming posts as they are made,sentiment is not important in determining

with some simply not allowed to be made,deletion. This presages the work of King etwhile others are implicitly filtered until

al. which, by setting up a message board

they can be manually checked.

in China and making use of the necessary

involves a situation where the user is asked

censorship tools, finds that, if anything, “it is

to wait for a few minutes for the post tothat submissions in favor of the government

be “synchronized by the data server”; thisare reviewed more often than those against

sometimes takes many hours.

the government!”

14– perhaps censors are on

the lookout for sarcasm.

19

20

18

Zhu

The latter

Though theexistence of such a system is unsurprising,its implications are interesting, as it shows

Zhu et al . looks at users who have ahigh rate of post deletions

15

that Sina does not mind lying to create anwith deletion

environment where censorship is less visible

resolution down to minute intervals.

– softer – providing further evidence for the

They want to see “how users who

assertion that the glitches in keyword search

discuss sensitive topics will experience

mentioned above are not mere glitches. The

Weibo’s censorship”.

16

Unsurprisingly,

existence of “camouflaged posts”, where

deletion speeds are found to be fastest forother users cannot see your posts (though

hot topics.

17

This concurs with King et al.’s

you can),

21

is another example.

Weibo’s Death by Engineered Boredom
Since the time of the work examinedof Weibo as a leading space is captured

above, Sina Weibo’s golden age has passed,in Rauchfleisch and Schäfer, with material

and therefore research into its current

covering 2013.

mobilization potential is no longer sensible.

concentrate on everyday platform use: how

Three of the most recent noteworthy articles

it has become commodified,22

23(Huang and Sun , Tong and Zuo , and25

collective memory,

Newer articles tend to27

26

how it shapes

or, in one case, helpfully

Bondes and Schucher ) were all submitted

24plotting its relative demise complete withfor publication in mid-2012. The twilightvarious time-series graphs (see Fig. 1 below

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for an example).

28

Browsing Google Scholaron the side of “friction” being more

one is struck by the proliferation of articles

important, readily admits that “the Chinese

by public health researchers and computer

government focuses its intimidation efforts

scientists using the utterances as a linguistic

on high-profile bloggers”,

29

34

while declaring

By early 2014, WeChat, a service

this to be consistent with a friction strategy

similar to Japan’s Line, was seen as the new

as it has downstream friction effects on the

cutting edge information sharing system,

spread of information. Fu and Chau provide

with Sina Weibo’s user-base having slid

statistics to back up the assertion that the

corpus.

9% in 2013.

30

This is assumed to be largely

power-users were key to Weibo’s appeal,

due to the August-October 2013 crackdown

indicating that 60% of Weibo accounts have31

and their

never posted, with 90% of the ones who have32

posted not making an “original post in awith interpretations of laws indicating that

7-day study period”, and only 0.45% posting“any online post containing defamatory

more than 40 times within this timeframe.

information would be considered a ‘serious

Thus, a small group of users created aoffense’ under the Criminal Law if it received

majority of the content, with only about 2%

more than 5,000 views or was reposted moreof all accounts managing to create posts that

confronting Weibo power-users

potential for “online rumor-mongering”,

than 500 times.”

33

Roberts, though she falls squarely

Figure 1:

were reposted or received comments at least
once.

35

36

Average posts per day per account (black: all; blue: original; red: forwarded)

Research on Chinese Social Media Censorship as Contemporary Archaeology

75Effects of Platform Migration on Censorship Tactics and Research
ThereonAt least in China, then, the future of social

the functions that are currently served
43

media research wishing to understand today'sby foreign companies, such as VPNs

politics by means of contemporary artifacts

Amazon Web Services. The latter is awould seem to belong to investigations into

particularly tricky problem for the censors

the cat-and-mouse game being played out on

as dissident websites such as Greatfire.org

instant messaging services, concentrating

and technology companies like Xiaomi useon the relatively prosaic keyword lists,

the same encrypted servers.

technical details of the software’s censorshipmeans blocking both. With a national LAN,

implementation, as well as the potentiallysuch problems would be solved, though thefascinating and very real presence ofsolution is extreme. Would this push thepervasive surveillance on such services as(typically VPN-using) intellectuals to thethe former TOM-Skype

37

and WeChat.

38

44

and

Blocking one

street?

The problem with such work lies in the

Chinese social media censorship isnature of surveillance. Censorship involves

theorized as preventing those who wouldinterference, which can be measured;rise up in opposition from having thesurveillance does not. However, while

information required to do so, being: how

WeChat is cited as the destination to which

many people will join me? It allows dissent

Weibo users migrated,39

the crackdown has

extended to this new space as well,

40

with

foreign services such as KakaoTalk and Line
blocked.

41

Thus perhaps an emerging line ofto simmer while suppressing any display ofthe peaks of discontent that could trigger anoverthrow.

45

Volume bursts are specificallysquelched when related to collective action
46

research belongs to those who look into theand criticism of censors,effects of particularly constrained, thoughpolicy criticism is seen as unproblematic.

lively, social media environments on publicThus maybe, no matter how “hard” thediscourse.

censorship, as it will certainly appear if

while general

Some, such as Mo Zhixu, see in thisan Internet-savvy populace is placed in a

increasingly constrictive pattern thenational-LAN cage, squelching the ability toinevitability of the Great Firewall morphingcalculate a cost-benefit analysis of showing

into a “National LAN”

42

as soon as

Chinese applications are able to handle

76

up in the street may be more important thankeeping up appearances.

東京大学大学院情報学環紀要

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Internet Archaeology
It should be clear by now that doing

can be used to draw parallels with theresearch on current Sina Weibo censorshipgoals of censors attempting to cleanse otherarchitecture is not particularly usefulplatforms that, as they are less public, may

to understand how collective action is

be impossible to study in the same depth.

suppressed in the present. Those interested

It would also be useful in studying Chinese

in forming a politically engaged community

government reaction to events that occurred

have migrated to other platforms that are

during the three-year timeframe, particularly

less public, which are in turn consistently

by examining relationships between social

being purged. There remains, however,and traditional media. We must be goodpotential in the study of Weibo as a historicalarchaeologists and remember that though

artifact during its approximately three-year

our subject is less than a decade old, rapid

period of particular cultural relevance (2010shifts in tool use demand attention to strata

to mid-2013) in order to better understandcontext. The persistence of a platform’s

the goals (and the degree to which they

existence does not mean it has the same

are realized) of the censors at both thecollective uses or is used by the same people

company and government level. Such efforts

at similar rates in similar ways.

1

Bamman, O’Connor, and Smith, “Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese Social Media.”2

The blocking of a website by means of targeting its numerical address.

3

Fear being a naked warning against accessing illicit content; friction being making the content more annoying to access, making
it more likely that the casual user will no longer choose to access such content.

4

As opposed to a population of opinion leaders or “sensitive” users.

5

Roberts, “Fear or Friction?,” 17–23.

6

Ibid., 23–28.

7

Ibid., 6–17.

8

See Hassanpour, “Media Disruption and Revolutionary Unrest” for a look at the protest-widening mistake the Egyptian state
made in shutting down the internet during the 2011 “Arab Spring” as well as Gohdes, “Pulling the Plug” for the idea ofInternet blackouts being useful in a civil war scenario as opposition coordination can be disrupted allowing for military offensives.
Civil war would seem to be a special case – where blocking the Internet is mainly an update or extension of the radar jamming
tactic. In civil war, convincing the populace of the state’s benevolence is a secondary goal.

9

Whereby a URL does not resolve to the IP address desired by the user. This may cloak the block in friction, by causing the user
to believe it is the desired website's fault rather than that of the authorities.

10

The use of large amounts of digital footprints in order to understand social phenomena by means of aggregation.

11

Through cross-province networking; see Huang and Sun, “Weibo Network, Information Diffusion and Implications for Collective
Action in China.”

Research on Chinese Social Media Censorship as Contemporary Archaeology

77

12

Roberts, “Fear or Friction?,” 29.

13This unmanipulated, or at least relatively unmanipulated, state was revealed by expanding the requested timeframe and thenfocusing on the posts that were missing from the more stringent search.

14

King, Pan, and Roberts, “Reverse Engineering Chinese Censorship through Randomized Experimentation and Participant
Observation,” 19.

15

Zhu et al., “The Velocity of Censorship,” 2.

16

Ibid., 3.

17

Ibid., 2; ibid., 5.

18

King, Pan, and Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.”19

Zhu et al., “The Velocity of Censorship,” 6.

20

Ibid.

21

Ibid.

22

Huang and Sun, “Weibo Network, Information Diffusion and Implications for Collective Action in China.”

23

Tong and Zuo, “Weibo Communication and Government Legitimacy in China.”

24

Bondes and Schucher, “Derailed Emotions.”

25

Rauchfleisch and Schäfer, “Multiple Public Spheres of Weibo.”

26

Fuchs, “Baidu, Weibo and Renren.”

27

Zhao and Liu, “Social Media and Collective Remembrance.”

28

Xia et al., “On the Rise and Fall of Sina Weibo.”

29

Another reason for this trend: the increasing numbers of Chinese scholars publishing in English.

30

Wade, “Weibo User Numbers Slide as Rivals Grow.”

31

Custer, “The Demise of Sina Weibo: Censorship Or Evolution?”

32

Though this extended even to children if the rumor they started was considered problematic enough.

33“A Chronicle of China’s Social Media Crackdown.”

34

Roberts, “Fear or Friction?,” 29.

35

Fu and Chau, “Reality Check for the Chinese Microblog Space.”36

Xia et al., “On the Rise and Fall of Sina Weibo.”

37

A Chinese version of Skype. Until November 2013, if one attempted to reach Skype.com in China, a URL redirect would send
the user to tom.skype.com, the homepage of TOM-Skype, a partnership between Microsoft and a Chinese firm. For more
information, see “Small Step for Microsoft - Huge Improvement for Chinese Users.”

38

Henochowicz, “Beware the WeChat Spy.”

39

Rudolph, “Censorship and Innovation in China’s Social Media.”40

Rajagopalan, “China Renews Crackdown on Tencent’s Messaging App WeChat.”

41

Lee, “China Tells South Korea It Blocked KakaoTalk, Line to Fight Terrorism.”

42

Mo,“The Advent of a National LAN in China.”

43

Used by businesses for security as well as those wishing to climb the Great Firewall.

44

Ornell, “Who’s Behind Greatfire.org?”

45

Lorentzen, “China’s Strategic Censorship.”

46

King, Pan, and Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.”78

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CADER

Joshua (ケイダ・ジョシュア)［生年月］1986 年 4 月生まれ
［出身大学または最終学歴］早稲田大学大学院アジア太平洋研究科修士課程終了［専攻領域］社会運動論、政治学、メディア研究［所属］東京大学大学院学際情報学府博士課程［所属学会］Association of Internet Researchers, International Studies Association

80

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情報学研究

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Research on Chinese Social Media Censorshipas Contemporary Archaeology
Joshua Cader*
As social media use has become ubiquitous and increasingly an inseparable component of
everyday actions rather than operating in a separate sphere, research projects using the large
amounts of data generated by social media use have correspondingly increased in number. Suchprojects do not merely mean to understand social media use, but make assumptions based on
this use, extrapolating the userbase or material present on the platform the data is drawn fromto the larger society. While sampling issues have forever been a problem in social research,
the types of problems presented by the extrapolation of a platform's userbase differ due to the
speed not only at which this userbase changes, but of usage type shifts.
This essay uses as example of the necessity of shifts in research agenda tracking shifts inusage a selection of work examining censorship on China's Sina Weibo microblog platform at
peak platform vitality. The goal is to see how Chinese social media censorship and the research
examining it evolved in tandem, this evolution being largely determined by shifts in usage
patterns sped up by network effects and the increasing sophistication of censorship technology
and strategy. When the platform became moribund, research consequently shifted away frompolitical topics towards use of the platform as mere corpus. Uses for a platform that is no longer
politically vital as the subject of political research are also suggested.

* Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo
Key Words：Weibo, social media, internet, censorship, China, politics, information friction, platform migration

Research on Chinese Social Media Censorship as Contemporary Archaeology

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