Days after China’s microblogging site Weibo was thrust back into the spotlight by the muzzling of one of its most influential users, a new report peels back the curtain on how the Twitter-like service handles censorship requests.
It also illuminates how the social media platform, which is fading in popularity, got pushed off center stage in the first place.
The report, published Thursday by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, is based on work logs provided by an unnamed former member of Weibo’s censorship team. The censor worked out of Weibo’s office in the coastal city of Tianjin during the company’s heyday from 2011 to 2013, according to the report.
“The work environment was stiff and dull. Morale was low,” the former censor says of his team in a Q&A accompanying the report. “There was never much chatter in the lounge.”
For a time Weibo was an indispensable driver of public discussion in China, a virtual speakers’ corner where tens of millions of users logged on daily. More heavy-handed censorship rules and the advent of Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s popular messaging app WeChat sapped away a lot of that influence — although a few power users, such as recently-censured businessman Ren Zhiqiang, have at least kept it in the conversation.
CPJ is not the first organization to examine the censorship system at Weibo. In 2013, Reuters also profiled the company’s censorship team in Tianjin, noting the malaise as well as a lack of gender diversity among its roughly 150 employees, all male college graduates.
The CPJ report nevertheless offers new detail about the methods and mechanisms of a censorship apparatus that has long fascinated observers of what China calls “public opinion management.”
Much of the detail comes from the censorship logs, which recorded instructions given to censorship department employees by their managers, the report says. The ultimate source of the orders was government agencies, chiefly the Cyberspace Administration of China, which relayed censorship requests through a government relations specialist.
The logs cover censorship instructions from 2011 until 2014, the report says. The report’s author, Yaqiu Wang, told China Real Time that the former censor was able to obtain some of the documents from other censors after he left.
Weibo is sometimes portrayed as ruthless in deleting sensitive information, and there are instances where the logs appear to bear that out. After a 2011 armed attack on a police station in Hetian, in China’s ethnically diverse Xinjiang region, the instructions were unequivocal, according to the report. “All the nonsense and posts point at ethnic policies and the police; censor them resolutely!” the report quotes the log as saying that day.
But in other instances, the report notes, Weibo can be seen clearly struggling to balance its need to satisfy censors and a desire not to alienate users. Such is the case even at highly sensitive times like January 2013, when controversy over censorship of an editorial by the hard-charging Southern Weekly newspaper spilled over into major protests outside the newspaper’s offices in Guangzhou.
“Maintain the same level of censorship [as in previous days], mainly make posts unable to be shared,” read the log from Jan. 7, 2013. “To those extreme posts that attack the party and leaders and call for protests, make them invisible. Do not overkill.”
Another January 2013 log urges employees to make sure they don’t censor more heavily than their counterparts at a rival platform run by Tencent.
CPJ quoted a representative of Sina Corp., Weibo’s parent company, saying the company wouldn’t verify the documents. China Real Time was unable to independently verify the content of the logs cited in the report. Weibo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Wang, the report’s author, said she made contact with the former censor after she asked a question about censorship on Weibo and he responded with detailed knowledge. They move the conversation to Twitter and he eventually sent her the documents, she said.
The former censor says in the Q&A that he decided to leave Weibo after a heavy crackdown on online rumors and influential verified users known as Big Vs in 2013.
“The core of Weibo censorship is the lack of clear rules that users can follow. You don’t know whether you will be the next target of censorship,” he says. “Such tactics instill fear in you, then you start to behave yourself. Gradually, it becomes natural not to speak your mind.”
Counterintuitively, he says he thinks that over time, Weibo has likely gotten worse at censorship, not better. He notes that during his time there, the number of sensitive keywords jumped from 2,000 to more than 10,000, which overwhelmed the censors and lowered the quality of their work.
“More censorship doesn’t necessarily mean better censorship,” he says.
Some observers have said the blocking of Mr. Ren, who lost his account with its 37 million followers after criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s media policies, could deal a severe blow to Weibo. The Nasdaq-listed company saw shares drop 5% the first trading day after Mr. Ren was silenced, though it has recovered somewhat since. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/03/do-not-overkill-report-sheds-new-light-on-chinese-censorship/
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