Selective Censorship on Rightists and Leftists? An Observation and Analysis of Censored Social Media Posts in China

This study examines whether social media censorship in China is selective for online social groups of different ideologies, namely rightists and leftists, what content generated by these groups is censored, and what censorship methods are employed on the two groups. To answer these underexplored questions, we observed censorship practices on Sina Weibo for a full month and collected and analyzed the censored social media posts of both rightists and leftists. Our analysis confirmed the existence of selective censorship on posts by the two groups.