Chinese censors’ looser social media grip ‘may help flag threats’
The central government could be letting some talk of protests and corrupt officials to flourish to keep tabs on social risks, researchers find
The Chinese government may be allowing some discussion of protests and allegations of corruption on social media to keep a closer eye on local officials and potential threats to stability.
That is the conclusion of a team of researchers from Hong Kong, Sweden and the United States who mined a data set of more than 13 billion blog posts in 2009-2013 on Sino Weibo, the mainland’s biggest microblogging platform.
The mainland has tightened its grip on online comments in recent years, including detaining some of the most popular Weibo commentators.
But “a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media” during the five-year period, the researchers said in their paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives published by the American Economics Association.
The study’s authors – University of Hong Kong assistant professor Qin Bei, University of Southern California assistant professor Wu Yanhui and Stockholm University professor David Stroemberg – found that 382,000 posts in the data set alluded to conflicts and as many as 2.5 million related to mass events such as protests and strikes.
