Web Censorship in China: What are the statistics of tweets censored and taken down on Sina Weibo? Is there a way just to keep a history of that?

An extensive answer to this question can be found in the paper behind.

Deletion rate of posts on Sina Weibo is estimated to 16%, growing up to 50+ % in region like Tibet ot Ningxia.

– Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media

by David Bamman, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith in First Monday - March 2012

With Twitter and Facebook blocked in China, the stream of information from Chinese domestic social media provides a case study of social media behavior under the influence of active censorship. While much work has looked at efforts to prevent access to information in China (including IP blocking of foreign websites or search engine filtering), we present here the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, i.e., the active deletion of messages published by individuals.

In a statistical analysis of 56 million messages (212,583 of which have been deleted out of 1.3 million checked, more than 16%) from the domestic Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, and 11 million Chinese-language messages from Twitter, we uncover a set a politically sensitive terms whose presence in a message leads to anomalously higher rates of deletion. We also note that the rate of message deletion is not uniform throughout the country, with messages originating in the outlying provinces of Tibet and Qinghai exhibiting much higher deletion rates than those from eastern areas like Beijing.

Read the whole paper here : http://brenocon.com/censorship.b …

This text was originally published in quora.