Weiboscope Open Data

Welcome to the Open Weiboscope Data Access website. Weiboscope is a data collection and visualization project developed by the research team at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong (JMSC). One of the objectives of the project is to make censored Sina Weibo posts of a selected group of Chinese microbloggers publicly accessible, which enables academic use of the data for better understanding of the social media in China and making the Chinese media system more transparent. Since January 2011, the project has been regularly sampling timelines of more than 350,000 Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers. The methodology has been detailed in an IEEE Internet Computing article (Fu, Chan, Chau, 2013). Besides, we have sampled Sina Weibo accounts randomly since 2012 and the samples' most recent timeline were collected and stored into the dataset. Our sampling approach is reported in a PLOS ONE article (Fu, Chau, 2013). This site contains all the Weiboscope data collected in the year 2012. We are delighted to share the data for open access. But for ethical reason, the data are anonymized, i.e. real user and message id are replaced by pseudo ID. When using the data, please cite the paper below. King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the 'Real Name Registration' Policy. IEEE Internet Computing. 2013; 17(3): 42-50. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28 Data Set Statistics: Number of weibo messages: 226841122 Number of deleted messages: 10865955 Number of censored ('Permission Denied') messages: 86083 Number of unique weibo users: 14387628 Enquiry: Send your question/comment to [e-mail]. The project is funded by the University of Hong Kong Seed Funding Program for Basic Research.Citation:Fu KW, Chan CH, Chau M. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy. Internet Computing, IEEE. 2013; 17(3): 42-50.

欢迎莅临香港中文大学新闻与媒体研究中心Weiboscope数据访问平台。Weiboscope是一项由该中心研究团队开发的数据收集与可视化项目。项目之一旨在使特定群体中国微博用户的审查内容公开可访问，从而便于学术研究者利用该数据深入理解中国社交媒体的运作机制，并促进中国媒体体系的透明化。自2011年1月起，项目已定期采集超过35万拥有超过1000名粉丝的中国微博用户的动态信息。该研究方法已在2013年IEEE互联网计算杂志上发表（Fu, Chan, Chau, 2013）。此外，自2012年起，我们对新浪微博账户进行了随机抽样，并将样本的最新动态信息收集并存储于数据集中。我们的抽样方法已在2013年PLOS ONE杂志上发表（Fu, Chau, 2013）。本站包含2012年收集的所有Weiboscope数据。我们非常高兴能够共享这些数据以供开放访问。然而，出于伦理考量，数据已被匿名化处理，即真实用户和消息ID已被伪ID所替代。在使用数据时，请引用以下论文：King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau. 评估中国微博上的审查：歧视性关键词分析与实名制政策的影响评估。IEEE互联网计算。2013；17(3): 42-50. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28 数据集统计：微博消息数量：226,841,122，删除消息数量：10,865,955，审查（权限拒绝）消息数量：86,083，独特微博用户数量：14,387,628。咨询：请将您的疑问/评论发送至[e-mail]。本项研究由香港中文大学基础研究种子基金计划资助。引用：Fu KW, Chan CH, Chau M. 评估中国微博上的审查：歧视性关键词分析与实名制政策。互联网计算，IEEE。2013；17(3): 42-50。