An official website of the United States government
This paper investigates the relationship between demographics and the frequency of censored posts (weibos) on Sina Weibo. Our results indicate that demographics such as location, gender and paid for features do not provide a good degree of predictive power but help explain how censorship is applied on social media. Using a dataset of 226 million weibos collected in 2012, we apply a binomial regression model to evaluate the predictive quality of user demographics to identify candidates that may be targeted for censorship. Our results suggest male users who are verified (pay for mobile and security features) are more likely to be censored than females or users who are not verified. In addition, users from provinces such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Beijing are more heavily censored compared to any other province in China over the same period.
more »
« less
Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
-
Internet regulation in the form of online censorship and Internet shutdowns have been increasing over recent years. This paper presents a natural language processing (NLP) application for performing cross country probing that conceals the exact location of the originating request. A detailed discussion of the application aims to stimulate further investigation into new methods for measuring and quantifying Internet censorship practices around the world. In addition, results from two experiments involving search engine queries of banned keywords demonstrates censorship practices vary across different search engines. These results suggest opportunities for developing circumvention technologies that enable open and free access to information.more » « less
-
The objective of this research paper is to provide a methodology for measuring the financial impacts of Internet outages. The financial impacts are measured against a Nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for several states in India to project the aftermath of Internet outage episodes. In addition historical trends are analyzed to help derive predictive logic for Internet outages in order to forecast Internet shutdown incidents based on antecedent events. Results demonstrate the proposed method for determining economic loss highlights several factors and may at times be influenced by the frequency of events compared to overall size of GDP. In addition, historical trend analysis of Internet outages suggests that a predictive model to forecast future outages can help reveal underlying policies toward Internet censorship.more » « less
-
We collect a corpus of 1554 online news articles from 23 RSS feeds and analyze it in terms of controversy and sentiment. We use several existing sentiment lexicons and lists of controversial terms to perform a number of statistical analyses that explore how sentiment and controversy are related. We conclude that the negative sentiment and controversy are not necessarily positively correlated as has been claimed in the past. In addition, we apply an information theoretic approach and suggest that entropy might be a good predictor of controversy.more » « less
-
This paper investigates censorship from a linguistic perspective. We collect a corpus of censored and uncensored posts on a number of topics, build a classifier that predicts censorship decisions independent of discussion topics. Our investigation reveals that the strongest linguistic indicator of censored content of our corpus is its readability.more » « less
Full Text Available