Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (And Why)

What did Chinese authorities do in July 2009 when tensions between the predominantly Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province and authorities escalated into violent riots? They turned off the Internet in Xinjiang. This inspired China scholar Jason Q. Ng to devise a computer script to test all 700,000 terms in Chinese Wikipedia to see which ones are routinely censored on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, which currently has over 300 million users.