Chinese Politburo - Tell me what you are concerned about but leave it up to us to fix

Well this is very interesting. Study of Internet censorship reveals the deepest fears of China's government by Mara Hvistendahl.

Behind China’s vaunted Internet censorship are throngs of specialized police officers, fake commentators, and ever-changing technologies. But China watchers have puzzled over the system’s modus operandi. Some posts are swiftly culled, whereas others on seemingly more sensitive topics are left untouched. In the most revealing study yet of Chinese censorship, researchers describe today how they peered behind the curtain to find out what China’s censors—and presumably the government officials operating behind the scenes—fear most.

When political scientist Gary King of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and Ph.D. students Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts began examining censorship in China in 2011, many scholars assumed that calling for policy changes, criticizing government leaders, and raising sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 were verboten. To test that assumption, the trio downloaded millions of social media posts from more than 1300 sites between January and July 2011, then selected roughly 127,000 of them to examine in more detail. They watched in real time as posts were taken down. Censorship in China, King says, is “like an elephant tiptoeing around. It leaves big footprints.”

In most cases, censors reacted swiftly, deleting messages within a day of posting. They also seemed to follow a surprising logic. The researchers found that posts on topics they themselves classified as highly sensitive were only slightly more likely than average to be deleted—24% of posts, versus 13% overall. That was “completely unexpected,” King says. They next looked at bursts of posts following significant events. During events with potential for collective action, the vast majority of posts were censored—regardless of whether they supported or criticized the state.

However,

That study, published in American Political Science Review in May 2013, was blind to posts that never went online in the first place because they were snagged in an automated censorship filter. To truly understand what is censored in China, King and colleagues realized, they would need to write their own posts. And that meant creating an unprecedented participatory experiment on China’s blogs, microblogs, and forums—one that “probes much deeper than earlier studies,” says Noah Smith, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study.

Over three 1- to 2-week periods last year, the researchers oversaw assistants in China and the United States who opened 200 user accounts at 100 sites and then authored 1200 unique posts. Some commented on events involving collective action, such as volatile demonstrations over government land grabs in Fujian province. Others responded to events involving no collective action, like a corruption investigation of a provincial vice governor. For each event, the assistants authored both pro- and antigovernment posts. Posts created by the team advocating collective action were between 20% and 40% more likely to be censored than were posts not advocating it, the team reports online today in Science. Posts critical of the government, on the other hand, were not significantly more likely to be censored than supportive posts—even when they called out leaders by name. “Criticisms of the state are quite useful for the government in identifying public sentiment, whereas the spread of collective action is potentially very damaging,” Roberts explains.

I love this. I spend a lot of time carping and complaining about poorly designed experimental work generating cognitive pollution. This is a delightful example of smart work adjusting to its own weaknesses to yield useful information.

The upshot is that the government (local or central) is much more concerned about efforts at collective action than they are about criticism per se. Indeed, I am guessing that they are being quite smart about not just using criticisms to identify "public sentiment" but probably also using such criticism to shape the government agenda. The increasing focus and public demonstrations of punishment for corruption are incompatible with individual elite members but are wholly compatible with a strategic desire to maintain elite power.