New Semi-Censorship
We are currently monitoring more than 12,000 keywords on Sina Weibo, out of which around 2500 are currently blocked. When searching for any of those blocked keywords, you get the following message:
根据相关法律法规和政策,“[the blocked keyword]”搜索结果未予显示。
This translates into:
According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for [the blocked keyword] can not be displayed.
These keywords generate no search results at all. Recently, however, a new form of self-censorship has emerged in which some results are returned but not all (big thanks to Jason Ng at BlockedOnWeibo for letting us know). Take, for example, weibo: 八九纪念 ("remember 89") and weibo: 河蟹 ("river crab", used instead of 和谐 which means "harmony" and is used to refer to censorship). These had been fully blocked since we started monitoring them in May this year. However, sometime in September, searching for either of the two started returning some results, followed by this new message:
根据相关法律法规和政策,部分搜索结果未予显示。
which translates into:
According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, some of the search results for [the blocked keyword] can not be displayed.
An even more interesting example is weibo: 民泽江. It used to be fully blocked, but in September was partially unblocked (displaying the message quoted above). Then, at least as of October 1, it has been fully unblocked.
This new semi-censorship level resembles the one practiced by Baidu, which admits to self-censoring but still returns selected results.