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Censorship has a long history in China, extending from the efforts of Emperor Qin to burn Confucian texts in the third century BCE to the control of traditional broadcast media under Communist Party rule. However, with the rise of the Internet and new media platforms, more than 1.3 billion people can now broadcast their individual views, making information far more diffuse and considerably harder to control. In response, the government has built a massive social media censorship organization, the result of which constitutes the largest selective suppression of human communication in the recorded history of any country. We show that this large system, designed to suppress information, paradoxically leaves large footprints and so reveals a great deal about itself and the intentions of the government.

The Chinese censorship decision tree. The pictures shown are examples of real (and typical) websites …