{
  "id": 8100,
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.1.117",
  "title": "Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda",
  "summary": "In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo—the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform—during the 2009–2013 period. Our primary finding is that a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media. For instance, we find millions of posts discussing protests, and th",
  "authors": "Bei Qin, David Strömberg, Yanhui Wu",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "privacy-surveillance",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": "china",
  "published_at": "2017-01-30T00:00:00.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-14T16:33:34.084Z",
  "source_slug": "openalex",
  "source_name": "OpenAlex",
  "source_homepage": "https://openalex.org",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/8100",
  "original_url": "https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.1.117",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}