It’s no secret that the Chinese internet is highly censored. It has been dubbed The Great Firewall and it restricts users from searching or sharing various phrases and words to altogether denying them access to historical facts.
But there are activists from GreatFire out there who have created FreeWeibo – the answer to Sina Weibo. The search engine collects all the censored and deleted posts that originally appeared on the Sina Weibo platform and provides the users with a wide range of information.
Weibo is similar to Twitter – if something is posted and then deleted, it still exists on Twitter for a short time. On Sina Weibo, posts disappear all the time: the platform’s self censorship is apparently very sophisticated and the company employs 1000 content supervisors to deal with the harmful information, a wide umbrella term that is not very clear on what exactly is regarded as ‘harmful’.
FreeWeibo finds the posts that existed on the platform and have been deleted and they subsequently repost it on their website.
Though FreeWeibo is working within the law – under the Chinese constitution, the Chinese people can express themselves and have freedom of speech – the Chinese government has attempted to take them down many times.
FreeWeibo has a Twitter where you can follow their ambitious undertaking in fighting Chinese censorship, if you so feel inclined.
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