Fascinatingly awful.
Via Popular Mechanics:
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.