10/03/2014

Mining the Internet for Clues to Chinese Censorship

16:59 minutes

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.

Segment Guests

Gary King

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor in the department of government, and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Meet the Producer

About Charles Bergquist

As Science Friday’s director and senior producer, Charles Bergquist channels the chaos of a live production studio into something sounding like a radio program. Favorite topics include planetary sciences, chemistry, materials, and shiny things with blinking lights.

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