China's Censorship Can Be Described As Lightning Fast
A lot of amazing things happen in China. They're capable of a lot of feats, that you have to give them. From creating replica cities to buildings to technology, they are also very skilled at censoring.
Take their Twitter equivalent - Weibo for example. And if you've used Twitter, you'll know it's filled with a whole lot of nonsense. China doesn't share it's censoring methods, but computer scientists have been able to figure out how they do it.
Wiebo has some 300 million users who send roughly 100 million messages a day between them. Dan Wallach or Rice University in Texas and his partners were able to uncover the true speed of China's censorship, considering that means 70,000 messages per minute!
30 percent of the "tweets" manage to be censored within the minute they are pushed out and 90 percent within the day. According to Wallach's calculations:
If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that's a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.
Very impressive! [MIT Technology Review]
