Assessing Post Deletion in Sina Weibo: Multi-modal Classification of Hot Topics

Abstract

Widespread Chinese social media applications such as Weibo are widely known for monitoring and deleting posts to conform to Chinese government requirements. In this paper, we focus on analyzing a dataset of censored and uncensored posts in Weibo. Despite previous work that only considers text content of posts, we take a multi-modal approach that takes into account both text and image content. We categorize this dataset into 14 categories that have the potential to be censored on Weibo, and seek to quantify censorship by topic. Specifically, we investigate how different factors interact to affect censorship. We also investigate how consistently and how quickly different topics are censored. To this end, we have assembled an image dataset with 18,966 images, as well as a text dataset with 994 posts from 14 categories. We then utilized deep learning, CNN localization, and NLP techniques to analyze the target dataset and extract categories, for further analysis to better understand censorship mechanisms in Weibo. We found that sentiment is the only indicator of censorship that is consistent across the variety of topics we identified. Our finding matches with recently leaked logs from Sina Weibo. We also discovered that most categories like those related to anti-government actions (e.g. protest) or categories related to politicians (e.g. Xi Jinping) are often censored, whereas some categories such as crisisrelated categories (e.g. rainstorm) are less frequently censored. We also found that censored posts across all categories are deleted in three hours on average.

Look behind the Censorship: Reposting-User Characterization and Muted-Topic Restoration

“…Liu and Zhao [12] found that multimedia posts suffer more scrutiny than plain-text posts. Arefi et al [2] implemented a multi-model approach, combining computer vision and NLP techniques, to predict whether a post would be censored. They showed that political posts are more likely to be censored.…”

“…To cope with the challenge brought by its openness, Weibo set up a complicated system to impose censorship. 2 The users on this platform invented a term "JIA" (In English, "clipped") to refer to the occurrence of censorship. 3 Such reference signifies the frequency of posts being deleted or censored, and its consequential measures such as account being muted for a certain period of time or even the closure/suspension of the account.…”