# Unveiling the Dynamics of Censorship, COVID-19 Regulations, and Protest: An Empirical Study of Chinese Subreddit r/china_irl

**Authors:** Siyi Zhou, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara  
**arXiv:** [2304.02800](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02800)  
**Date:** 2023-04-06  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2304.02800v1/

## Key points

- COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted social issues that require academic investigation
- Silenced voices and censored content play a role in mobilizing social movements
- Study explores relationships among COVID-19 regulations, censorship, and protest in China during 2022
- Data collected from 1,249 censored articles and metadata/comments from Reddit community r/china_irl
- Findings reveal patterns in topic recurrence, interplay between censorship activities, user subscription behavior, collective commenting behavior, and linguistic adaptation strategies to circumvent censorship
- Event plot shows concentrated period of censoring for topics related to one social incident in 2022; censoring activities against topics related to social issues like COVID-19 regulations are more dispersed
- Study holds significant implications for understanding how marginalized groups survive within censored information ecosystems
- Research methodology involved Granger causality tests and Pearson correlation analysis to investigate relationship between Reddit user behavior and government censorship behavior; study limits itself to determining correlations rather than causal relationships.

## Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light several social issues that require academic investigation. While information dissemination has been extensively studied, the silenced voices and censored content also deserve attention due to their role in mobilizing social movements. This paper provides empirical evidence to explore the relationships among COVID-19 regulations, censorship, and protest through a series of social incidents that occurred in China during 2022. The study collected data from two sources: (i) 1,249 censored articles published since 2019 and (ii) metadata and 1.6 million comments from the Reddit community r/china_irl shared from December 2021 to January 2022. The censored articles were collected from China Digital Times (CDT), which provided the topic of the article in tags that were further refined by the researchers for better generalization of topics. The Reddit data was preprocessed using both Jieba and NLTK, with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Viterbi algorithm used for tokenization. The findings reveal patterns in topic recurrence, the complex interplay between censorship activities, user subscription behavior and collective commenting behavior as well as potential linguistic adaptation strategies to circumvent censorship. Figure 1 shows an event plot indicating when articles on a particular topic were censored; it suggests that while topics related to one social incident were censored for a concentrated period in 2022, censoring activities against topics related to social issues like COVID-19 regulations are more dispersed. Articles integrating multiple social incidents are labeled with the social issues they attempt to discuss such as Zero-COVID-19 or COVID-19 pandemic as a whole; those COVID-19 related articles tend to recur when a COVID-19 related incident happens regardless of censorship risk. This study holds significant implications for researchers interested in understanding how marginalized groups survive within censored information ecosystems. The research methodology involved Granger causality tests and Pearson correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between Reddit user behavior and government censorship behavior; however, the relationship between censorship, commenting, subscribing and linguistic patterns is not straightforward. The study limits itself to determining correlations rather than causal relationships. Overall, this paper provides valuable insights into how censorship affects online discussions in China during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights potential strategies for circumventing censorship.