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More than plain text: Censorship deletion in the Chinese social media
Author(s) -
Liu Jun,
Zhao Jingyi
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24390
Subject(s) - censorship , social media , the internet , computer science , content analysis , content (measure theory) , internet privacy , multimedia , world wide web , political science , sociology , law , social science , mathematical analysis , mathematics
Although the Internet allows people to circulate messages using different media, most censorship studies discuss the removal of text content. This article presents a systematic study regarding the censorship of both plain text and multimedia content on the Chinese Internet. By analyzing both censored and surviving posts on the Chinese social media platform Weibo during the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, we find that multimedia posts suffered more intensive censorship deletion than plain text posts, with censorship programs being oriented more toward multimedia content like images than the text content of multimedia posts. Our analysis has significant implications for censorship studies, information control, and politics in the “post‐text” era.