Questão 1779621

Texto para as questões de 76 a 78

Teams at Harvard and the University of Hong

Kong have been using new software that allows

them to watch the censoring of posts on Chinese

social-media sites more closely than before. And

5 now they have started to release some of their key

findings.

According to one report, a team of researchers

at Harvard found that 13% of all social-media

posts in China were censored. “The Chinese

10 government made the decision to allow its people

to have social media, but they also built a vast

machine to monitor what is said,” says Gary King,

a professor in the university’s government

department and the report’s lead author.

15 Mr King and his team used programs

developed by a company he co-founded, Crimson

Hexagon Inc, to monitor activity surrounding 85

sensitive topics. Their monitoring has been able to

identify when posts bearing these sensitive topics

20 appear and disappear—and with that, how long it

takes for each to be taken down.

The team has built up a database comprising

more than 11m posts that were made on 1,382

Chinese internet forums. Perhaps their most

25 surprising result is that posts critical of the

government are not rigorously censored. On the

other hand, posts that have the purpose of getting

people to assemble, potentially in protest, are

swept from the internet within a matter of hours.

30 In contrast to the Harvard team’s approach,

researchers at the University of Hong Kong have

developed a program that concentrates solely on

China’s most popular microblogging site, Sina

Weibo. They found that by monitoring Sina

35 Weibo’s account-holders’ profiles at different times

of day they were able to witness the work of the

censors almost in real time and to identify

individually the posts that they disappeared.

Economist.com, 10 July, 2012. Adaptado.

O termo “sensitive”, empregado no texto (L. 18), pode ser substituído, sem prejuízo de sentido, por