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.<br>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.<br>欢迎访问开放微博观察（Weiboscope）数据访问网站。微博观察（Weiboscope）是由香港大学新闻与媒体研究中心（Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong，简称JMSC）研发团队打造的数据采集与可视化项目。该项目的核心目标之一，是将选定的一批中国微博博主的遭屏蔽新浪微博内容公开，以支持学术研究，助力学界深入理解中国社交媒体生态，并推动中国媒体环境更趋透明。自2011年1月起，项目团队定期对超过35万名粉丝量逾1000的中国微博博主的时间线内容进行采样，相关采样方法已在《IEEE Internet Computing》期刊论文（Fu、Chan、Chau，2013）中详细阐述。此外，项目自2012年起新增随机抽样方式采集新浪微博账号，将样本账号的最新时间线内容收录至数据集，相关抽样方法发表于《PLOS ONE》期刊论文（Fu、Chau，2013）。本网站包含2012年全年采集的全部Weiboscope数据集，我们竭诚开放共享该数据。但出于伦理考量，所有数据均已完成匿名化处理：真实用户ID与消息ID均替换为伪ID。使用本数据集时，请引用如下学术论文：傅京华（King-wa Fu）、陈启辉（CH Chan）、迈克尔·周（Michael Chau）：《评估中国微博审查：歧视性关键词分析与"实名制"政策影响评估》，《IEEE Internet Computing》，2013年；17(3): 42-50。链接：http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28。 数据集统计： 微博消息总量：226,841,122条 已删除消息：10,865,955条 被屏蔽（显示"权限不足"）的消息：86,083条 唯一微博用户数：14,387,628位 咨询渠道：如有疑问或建议，请发送邮件至[e-mail]。本项目由香港大学基础研究种子基金资助。 引用格式：傅京华、陈启辉、迈克尔·周：《评估中国微博审查：歧视性关键词分析与"实名制"政策》，《IEEE Internet Computing》，2013年；17(3): 42-50。