FreeWeibo ( zh, 自由微博) is a website that monitors and makes available content from leading Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo that has been

censored Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...

and deleted by

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

authorities under the

Great Firewall The Great Firewall (''GFW''; ) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected for ...

. The home page is constantly updated to show the latest most-censored Weibo content. The site allows searches for any deleted microblogging strings and content, such as the names of

dissident A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 20th ...

s, "64", "

tiananmen The Tiananmen (also Tian'anmen (天安门), Tienanmen, T’ien-an Men; ), or the Gate of Heaven-Sent Pacification, is a monumental gate in the city center of Beijing, China, the front gate of the Imperial City, Beijing, Imperial City of Beij ...

", dalai (as in

Dalai Lama Dalai Lama (, ; ) is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current D ...

, specifically the 14th Dalai Lama), "

Xinjiang independence The East Turkestan independence movement ( ug, شەرقىي تۈركىستان مۇستەقىللىق ھەرىكىتى; zh, s=东突厥斯坦独立运动) is a political movement that seeks the independence of East Turkestan, a large and sp ...

", "

Winnie the Pooh Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear and Pooh, is a fictional Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne and English illustrator E. H. Shepard. The first collection of stories about the character w ...

", and terms related to any breaking news deemed sensitive. In addition, there are many terms relating to advertising content, pornography and so on.

History

The founder of the site goes by the name "Martin Johnson". According to Deutsche Welle, he describes his mission as: breaking Chinese Internet censorship and creating a free Internet. The establishment of the FreeWeibo site specifically targets system-deleted posts on Sina Weibo,

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and other large community websites, since around 12 percent of all posts for other Weibo platforms are removed by censors.

Concept

The United States magazine ''

Quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica ( silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical ...

'' reported that one of the three founders of the site, "Charlie Smith", said out of concern about the CCP's censorship, they established in 2011 the Chinese website

GreatFire GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website that monitors the status of websites censored by the Great Firewall of China and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent the censorship and blockage of websites in China. Through an investigation by the Asso ...

with the aim to provide a resource to clearly show what was blocked.

Operation

"Martin Johnson" said that, like all major sites in China, Sina Weibo employs its own censors. They would manually remove content deemed sensitive, as automatic filtering cannot catch all such posts. Many comments are live for a few minutes or even hours before they are reviewed and deleted, so FreeWeibo makes use of this loophole and collect those posts. "Charlie Smith" said that they copy every Sina Weibo post, but this approach requires a huge storage capacity. According to the Deutsche Welle report, to access the FreeWeibo page from within China, people must use

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

software to bypass the authorities. FreeWeibo gathers data directly from Sina Weibo as well as from WeiboScope, which is a project by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the

University of Hong Kong The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the f ...

Objectives

In the Quartz report, "Charlie Smith" expected to defeat the censorship system with FreeWeibo. He said he would continue to pressure the Chinese government until they give up the practice.

Mobile app

On October 4, 2013, the outfit released an app version of the site in the Chinese

Apple App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Devel ...

in a collaboration with

Radio Netherlands Worldwide Radio Netherlands (RNW; nl, Radio Nederland Wereldomroep) was a public radio and television network based in Hilversum, producing and transmitting programmes for international audiences outside the Netherlands from 1947 to 2012. Its services i ...

. However, under pressure from the

Government of China The Government of the People's Republic of China () is an authoritarian political system in the People's Republic of China under the exclusive political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It consists of legislative, executive, m ...

, Apple took down the app on November 28.Index Freedom of Expression Awards: Digital activism nominee Free Weibo
18 Mar 2014

Awards

* 2013: Winner of Deutsche Welle "The Bobs" for Best Innovation.Winners 2013 - The Bobs - Best of Online Activism
/ref> * 2014: Nominated for the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards in digital activism.

Notes and references

External links

Official website (in Chinese)

Official website (in English)
{{Portal bar, China, Internet Internet in China Microblogging services Social networking websites