An Independent Project at Phillips Academy

Weibo Censorship Dashboard

Miles McCain and Jeffrey Shen

You are viewing an archived version of the Dashboard. This website was created as part of an Independent Project at Phillips Academy during the fall term of the 2018-2019 academic year. While it is no longer actively updated, you are still free to browse the website. Its information, however, may be out of date.

Approximately 13% of Weibo posts are censored, however no reliable and open source tool to track these censored posts currently exists. This dashboard provides an almost real-time feed of censorship on Weibo and is completely open-source and transparent.

For information on our methodology and Chinese Internet censorship, please see our paper. The source for this website is available freely online on GitHub. Download the most recent data with date ranges here.

  • The posts included in our data-set are not a representative sample of Weibo posts. Our data collection began on September 28, 2018. Recent posts are the oldest 2000 of the most recent 5000 collected posts.
  • All translations are provided by Google Translate.
  • Not all posts listed in this dashboard were necessarily censored by the government; some may have been deleted by the user who originally posted the content, and others may have been only censored temporarily.
  • Post removal is only one of many ways that Weibo and the Chinese government moderates content online. This dashboard provides a focused—albeit limited—view of Weibo censorship, and, by extension, Chinese censorship more broadly.

Significant Patterns

Common lexical patterns extracted from the 1,000 most recent potentially censored posts.

Potentially Censored Posts

Weibo posts that were once available but were subsequently taken down by either Weibo (as required by the Chinese government) or the user.