The first large-scale experimental study of web censorship in China is now revealing what the government suppresses and what it permits online. The researchers even went undercover, creating their own social media site in China to reverse-engineer how the country manipulates information.

The Chinese government has implemented what watchdog group Freedom House calls "the most elaborate system for Internet content control in the world," deploying hundreds of thousands of people to control the flow of information in China. In previous research, political scientist Jennifer Pan at Harvard University and her colleagues analyzed more than 11 million social media posts from nearly 1,400 websites across China. "And often times when we went back to posts, we found they were not there, which made us realize we had this collection of texts that had been censored by the state," she says.

To get a clearer picture of China's censorship, the researchers created accounts at 100 different social media sites geographically spread across China. These included 97 of the top blogging sites in the country, representing 87 percent of blog posts. Creating accounts on some of these sites required users to be in China at specific locales or to have local email addresses, so the scientists relied on a team of research assistants in China, many of whom remain anonymous.

The researchers wrote a total of 1,200 blog posts about events in the news in 2013. They were cautious to avoid disturbing the normal flow of Chinese society, a principle they compared to Star Trek's Prime Directive —by writing posts similar to real ones written by people in China. Events they covered included how Qui Cuo, a 20-year-old mother, immolated herself to protest China's repressive policies over Tibet, and how protesters in Fujian demanded greater compensation from officials who requisitioned their farmland to build a golf course.

The investigators next used a worldwide network of computers to observe which posts appeared online only briefly, which stayed online indefinitely without getting censored, and which were never published at all. They found that 40 percent of their comments underwent review, and of those, 63 percent never appeared online.

Surprisingly, posts that criticized China's government, its leaders, and its policies, as well as those about sensitive topics such as Tibet, were generally allowed to be published. "Criticisms turn out to be of tremendous value to China's leaders," says lead study author Gary King, a social scientist at Harvard University. "They are a great way of figuring out who's not doing a good job, of seeing which of the roughly 50,000 local governments is being led in a way that is not satisfying people and keeping them in check."

However, posts that mention collective action such as a gathering or protest are often censored, even if they support the government.

"When citizens are able to act collectively in one arena, such as supporting the government, that means they could act collectively in other contexts as well, and the state wants to limit people getting together outside of state control," Pan says. King noted this helped the Chinese government "keep a monopoly on mass action. They don't want someone with the power to move people unless it's the government."

Political scientist Peter Lorentzen at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn't involved in the study, says that the results "reinforce an emerging view among researchers on China that the [Chinese Communist] Party is much more open to criticism than outsiders might expect, as long as this criticism does not lead to any form of organization that might challenge its right to rule." (The researchers did note there was no censorship of posts about collective action events outside mainland China, nor on collective action events that occurred solely online.)

To dig even deeper into Chinese censorship, the researchers ran a play out of the investigative journalism playbook: They created their own Chinese social media site from inside China and watched how it was censored. The team purchased a URL, contracted with a company that provides hosting services, acquired the software needed to establish a community discussion forum, and asked customer support at those software firms for help on how to censor in such a way to keep the website in line with government requirements. Then they submitted, automatically reviewed, posted, and censored their own submissions. (The researchers are keeping the URL anonymous, and never made it available to anyone but themselves.)

The investigators suggest the Chinese government may allow free choice from a large number of censorship methods to promote innovation and competition in the technologies of censorship. Moreover, if social media site managers are uncertain about what the government wants censored, they may censor more aggressively to err on the side of caution. "It is easier to keep people away from a fuzzy line than from a clearly drawn one," the researchers write.

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