Mining the Internet for Clues to Chinese Censorship

Protests continue in Hong Kong, but only partial glimpses of that activity make it into mainland China. Gary King, a professor of government at Harvard, uncovered data on what kinds of social media posts are and are not censored in China. He used that data to try to reverse-engineer how China’s Internet censorship apparatus works, and found that calls to collective action, not direct criticism, were most likely to face the censor’s eraser.