HKU Bulletin February 2013 (Vol. 14 No. 2)

The word ‘tomato’ may seem innocuous enough, but in March last year it began to proliferate on China’s microblog service, Sina Weibo. The Chinese translation of the word contains two characters – for red and west – which had suddenly come to symbolise disgraced former Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai, who led a ‘red’ revival in his base in the west of the country. Microblog postings bearing this word were quickly deleted by Chinese censors. But not completely erased. Dr Fu King-wa, Assistant Professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), had developed a programme that can detect deleted posts and track topics of discussion. He was able to show how the word came to life and then disappeared in China’s microblog universe. “What is happening in social media in China is unprecedented, it’s very amazing,” he says. “There are a lot of dynamic and robust discussions happening on different, usually very hot social topics. Sometimes you can find these discussions on online forums but not to this scale of the microblog because people can circulate their posts to more than one million others in a short period of time.” Unique expertise Dr Fu began to investigate the potential of this social medium almost immediately after Sina Weibo was launched in 2010. A case that year involving a drunk driver who hit two people and dismissed his culpability by announcing that his father was Li Gang, a senior public security official, provoked outrage on the site. Other cases followed suit and similarly became a touchstone for criticism and dissatisfaction with the government. The government response, at least in the online world, was to censor. Cover Story Times report about former Premier Wen Jiabao’s wealth. Dr Fu has begun using the data to assess censorship and his paper titled ‘Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the “Real Name Registration” Policy’ has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet Computing journal. But given the volume of data, there is a limit to what he can do. “I can’t make use of all the data myself. I want to make it available to the public and other researchers. The worldwide trend is for people to share data,” he says. That will require more resources to develop the site, which currently is available to a limited circle and does not have a search function. Dr Fu is looking for more resources to develop it further. Looking for the bottom line In the meantime, he is continuing to monitor the volatility of political censorship in China. Last spring, for instance, the government began to require people to register for Weibo services using their real identity. Dr Fu’s programme then detected a big drop in postings by people who previously had written on sensitive issues critical of the government. After the new Party Congress ushered in a new leadership in October, however, microblogs were alight again with discussions of corruption in government. “The political environment in China keeps changing. I don’t know what will happen after three months, but now we see signs that people have more space to comment on corruption cases in China than half a year ago. It’s a cat and mouse game – people are trying to find the bottom line for freedom of speech that the government can tolerate for the moment.” The detection programme Dr Fu developed is helping the rest of the world to understand this bottom line, too. M Dr Fu was uniquely positioned to monitor the extent of this censorship. He has an MPhil in Electrical Engineering, an MA in Social Sciences and a PhD from the JMSC. He also worked as a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal . With support from HKU’s Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research, he combined his skills to develop a programme that detects patterns and finds relationships between people – information that is of interest not only in investigating censorship but also other kinds of research and commercial enterprise. He was able to identify more than 300,000 bloggers who each has more than 1,000 followers. The ‘disappearing’ blogs Using that base, he has mined their blogs at least once a day and found missing posts that were present in a previous visit but suddenly disappeared. Some may have been deleted by the bloggers themselves, but when censors deleted them a message appeared of ‘permission denied’, meaning the post still existed but followers could not get access. “Bloggers can include everyone, even celebrities who may not talk about politics but may talk about social issues,” he says. Apart from Bo Xilai, Dr Fu has detected deletions on such topics as dissident Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize and author Mo Yan’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Literature Prize, negative comments on Mao Tse-tung, and a New York Exposing the Censors A programme developed by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre can detect entries that have been deleted by government censors on China’s Sina Weibo microblog site. 4 5 6 7 8 9 7 : ; < 8 = > ? 8 @ A ? 8 B 8 6 C ; 6 A D 5 ; E 8 F 9 G H : A I I 5 J 5 K 8 < 5 I A < 9 8 L 9 A @ @ 5 ? 8 I 5 ? 5 M ? I 5 K 5 ? 5 I < 8 7 ? 7 8 6 C ; 6 A D 5 ; E 8 8 N ; 6 L ? 8 ? : 5 < 8 K ; ? ; M A K M 5 6 7 8 9 7 : ; < ; 6 4 : ; 6 A It’s a cat and mouse game – people are trying to find the bottom line for freedom of speech that the government can tolerate for the moment. O P Q R S T U V W X Y Graphical visualisation of interconnection between Chinese microbloggers Each red node represents a microblogger and its size is proportional to the number of followers of a microblogger. A grey arrow between two nodes signifies a retweet sent from one microblogger to another. This graph shows that the reposts were primarily diffused via the internet space by a few microbloggers with a large amount of followers. 09 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin Feburary 2013