Twitter is a majuscule space to say stupefied shit . Worst case scenario is that you calculate like an idiot . In China , thing are a bit dissimilar ; thousands of censor trawl the nation ’s Twitter - clone Weibo , quashing pestiferous dissent with lightning reflex response . And though China does n’t share its method , computing machine scientist have been able to figure out just how the wildly efficient the procedure must be .
Wiebo has some 300 million substance abuser who air roughly 100 million content a day between them . That ’s about 70,000 content per minute . By detect a sample distribution of 3500 placard who , between them , had about 4500 posts censor over 15 twenty-four hour period , Dan Wallach of Rice University in Houston , Texas and his partners were able to bring out the genuine , blinding speed of China ’s censoring .
Thirty percentage of the dissident tweets handle to be censor within the minute they are push out , and 90 percentage within the day . That ’s telling , but it only gets better ( worse ? ) when you calculate what that censor - military force must look like . According toWallach ’s figuring :
If an mediocre censor can skim around 50 office a mo , that would require some 1400 censors at any flash to plow the 70,000 post pouring in . And if they work 8 hour displacement , that ’s a total of 4200 censor on the payroll each day .
sure they must have help , keyword alerting , lists of trouble - placard , auto - block phrase like “ Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee ” for some reason , etc , but it ’s readable that China is place some serious endeavor into scrubbing Weibo fair in real time instead of delay post , or shutting down the inspection and repair all together . It just goes to show you could do anything you put your mind to , peculiarly if you ’re an dictatorial government the pits - dented on the continued inhibition of gratis language . Hooray . [ MIT Technology Review ]
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