More Than Plain Text: Censorship Deletion in The Chinese Social Media

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume72
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)18-31
ISSN1532-2890
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

ID: 242375325