The Media Law Project
29 February 2016
Media-X
1 March 2019

Weiboscope

Weiboscope is a Chinese social media data collection and visualisation project. One project objective, among many, is to make censored Sina Weibo posts of a selected group of Chinese microbloggers publicly accessible. Since January 2011, the system has been regularly sampling timelines of a set of selected Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers or whose posts are frequently censored.

In 2012, Weiboscope collected 226 million Weibo posts, among which more than 10.9 million were no longer publicly accessible because of either being censored by the authorities or being deleted voluntarily by the user. The 2012 Weibo dataset is available here.

To learn more about this project, please visit its website.