05/19: Jennifer Pan

[shevajia]

Comment below with a well-developed question or comment about the reading for this week's workshop. These are individual questions and comments.

Please post your question by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least three of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[xxicheng]

Hi Professor Pan,

Thank you for sharing your work with us! Your early work on Weibo censorship, using observational and experimental designs is one of the first social science articles that I have read. From then on I found this is a fascinating area, so technically speaking, I am a fan :) So excited to have you at our workshop tomorrow! My question is: do you think the Chinese government's control of social media has been changing from 2013 up to now? Are we now in a different world? The present Chinese social media is more divided to me, full of anger between different subgroups (male vs. feminists, nationalism vs. cosmopolitans, etc.), as well as more overconfidence in China. This is very different from how things were 10 years ago, I think. I remember more self-reflection on China or even flattery on the Western world around topics like democracy when I was in middle school. Would love to hear your thoughts! Thank you, and I look forward to your presentation tomorrow!

Best, Xi

[mdvadillo]

Hi Professor Pan,

Thank you for your presentation today. I found the methodology very ingenious, and was wondering if you were able to get some characteristics about the information that was flowing into China. Would it be the case that the information has certain common characteristics (aside from just relating to COVID-19), or maybe do the opposite analysis and see if the information that did not go into China had a different set of characteristics and features than the set of information that made its way into the country.

[YaoYao121]

Hi Prof. Pan, thank you for sharing such a interesting paper. I like the topic to study the flow between the rest of world and China. While, I wonder whether the finding that approximately one-fifth of content with relevance for China that gain widespread public attention on Twitter appear on Weibo indicates the flow from the World to China. Some topics and opinions might just originate from the worries and focus of domestic people themselves in China. The evidence could show a correlation between Twitter topics and Weibo topics, but may not be the causality.

[fiofiofiona]

Hi Professor Pan, thank you for sharing your research in our workshop. Chinese governmental censorship over information and social media has been a sensitive topic that many researchers have been carefully investigated. As co-occurrence of information on both Twitter and Weibo can be caused by information flow from one to the other platform, could the content originally be generated on a third platform? E.g. a short video clip first being generated on YouTube or Tiktok, and users spread it out to both Twitter and Weibo. In this case, how would you decide the direction of information flow? Thank you.

[mikepackard415]

Hi Professor Pan, Thank you for coming to the workshop and sharing such an interesting paper. I'm interested in the method of using a word2vec model to first find tweets and weibo posts that are close in vector space, Did you train the word2vec models yourself, and if so, how did you go about aligning them between the two languages? The cross-language nature of this project seems like it must have been a tough methodological challenge. I'd be interested to hear about how you went about developing the method. Thanks again!

[edelahayeUChicago]

Hi Professor,

I've got a question about the way in which tweets are matched to each other. Given that the text need not be the same on both platforms are there any issues on how a text might evolve to include/exclude information that wasn't in the original post. Obviously you use human raters to classify matches but could a tweet be "the same" whilst excluding an important dimension that has implications for the extent to which particular types of information within a tweet makes it from one platform to another?

Many thanks!

[NaiyuJ]

Hi Jen, thanks for discussing this interesting paper with us! Among all sources of information inflows, I find the most interesting case is how the commercialized media in China facilitates this sort of foreign information mobilization. I think it would be really fun if you can discuss more the motivation/ incentives of the commercialized media for disclosing information, the tradeoff between profit and state penalty, what kind of topics they will talk about, and what kind of topics they will not.

[atowey-uchi]

Hi Professor Pan! Thank you for coming to speak with us and sharing your work! I am curious about the role of rare events in your analysis. To focus on a time period in which a great amount of social upheaval is occurring may be a more extreme example of how the government interacts with censorship, especially when the pandemic was not a predicted or planned event. Do adverse, unexpected events curate different censorship patterns than run-of-the-mill day to day?

[cgyhumble0612]

Hi Professor Pan! Thank you for presenting us such an interesting paper and raise our attention on social media censorship in China. Actually, I'm very curious about the financial influence of Chinese censorship on these internet giants such as Sina and Tensent. Can we find other perspective to value the influence of Chinese censorship policies on information flow? Maybe the stock price changes of these social media companies?

[jinfei1125]

Hi Prof Pan, thank you so much for coming to our workshop and a very welcome from Chicago! My question is similar to Jasmine's, how do you separate the effect of language barriers from the government intervention? Another interesting thing is that I notice recently all social media suddenly support showing the IP address of the users who post and comment, for example, Beijing, Shanghai, Canada, and the US. Do you think this is a government intervention to make Chinese users actively refuse opinions from oversea users?

[zbchen0129]

Hi Professor Pan! Thank you for coming to speak with us and sharing your work! In your paper, you mention 'co-occurring content'. I just wonder how you decide which contents are co-occurring. Besides, what does the 'media or government affiliation' mean? Can users without it escape from the censorship?

[Tanzi11]

Looking forward to your work Professor Pan. I am interested in how social media spaces are treated as the right of the government--in that they can do things such as censorship. Do you think there may be positive repercussions to this as well? (Obviously, censorship is bad, but what about government regulation that can for instance, prevent hate or violence?) Thanks!

[wanxii]

Thanks so much for sharing your work. I wonder if the research could have some more profound implications, e.g. whether the flow of censored information might relate to some economic activities or group attitudes/ideologies. Many thanks!

[FrederickZhengHe]

Thanks very much for this interesting working paper, and I am very eager to listen to the presentation tomorrow. My question is: Why do you choose the +-five-day period of the timestamp of a Tweet instead of +- 3 days or +- 7 days? I think the reason here is not so developed. Many thanks!

[YileC928]

Hi Professor Pan, thank you so much for joining the workshop! The paper nicely depicts the big picture of cross-broader information dissemination, and the methodology part is especially intriguing. I am interested in learning if your team has attempted to investigate what kind of content is more likely to be transferred from the globe to China. Besides, as censorship is mentioned several times in the paper, have you explored how governmental censorship played a role here (i.e., the counterfactual - what would the sample and dissemination mechanism be like if there were no censorship)?

[Qlei23]

Hi Professor Pan, Thank you for sharing the research! The idea of co-occuring content between Twitter and Weibo is really interesting. Likewise, I am also interested in why you chose such a small sample and the patterns of tweets that emerge on Chinese social media. From my perspective, the selection bias of global information inflows and the number of "retweets" on Weibo may be another issue as some content may be censored even if it is posted on Weibo in order to limit the number of persons who can view it. I'd like to hear your opinions on such issues. Thank you!

[BaotongZh]

Hi Professor Pan, thank you for sharing such a great work, And as you mentioned in the last section of the paper you only concerned the Weibo and Twitter, I was just wondering how do you think of the information transmission between video platforms(like from TikTok to Douyin(Chinese TikTok)).

[kuitaiw]

Dear Prof Pan， Thanks a lot for sharing your work. I found your research is covid related. So I wonder if the study has general applicability? That is to say, can this be applied to other events?

[kthomas14]

Thank you for sharing your research with us professor Pan! It is interesting to read about the flow of information into China. I would be interested to hear about an analysis of topics that are not as closely related to events surrounding the pandemic. The topics that people feel compelled to share on a social media from outside sources may often include sensitive topics. I would also be interested to hear about an assessment of the spread of misinformation through inflow.

[y8script]

Hello Prof. Pan, thank you for bringing up this interesting study! I am curious about whether it is possible to identify the characteristics of information inflow through government/state media, overseas entities or individual Weibo users? Do you have hypotheses about which type of information is prioritized by each of the sources? Moreover, why certain information(from non-government/state media) are allowed by the censorship system while others didn't?

[97seshu]

Thanks for sharing your work, Prof. Pan! I wonder do you notice any regional differences in the intensity of government censorship inside of China?

[Toushirow1]

Hi Professor Pan, Thanks for sharing this research with us. I am interesting in the language processing for this research. Since there is a huge gap between the meaning of slangs in different culture context, how do you capture this difference in your research. And, do you think the information flowing from world to China affect on the policy making?

[sudhamshow]

Thanks for sharing your research Professor Pan! I am curious to know more about the dataset you used to train the word2vec model. I ask this because you collect data from January to April and depending on when the data was sampled, the context (and sentiment) of certain word usage might change over time. I am still unclear about how you would account for the messages on Weibo that would have been removed (since the messages are collected post hoc in April). If the rules or level of moderation changed (adapted) over time wouldn't this be a confounder when trying to study the flow of information influence to/from Weibo?

[siruizhou]

Thank you for presenting this interesting research Professor Pan. I'm interested in knowing how innovative language intentionally curated by Chinese netizens to avoid censorship would impact the information flow.

[zixu12]

Hi Professor Pan, thanks for coming to our workshop! I do agree with some questions posted with other classmates. E.g. during the pandemic, the less inflow of the information might be because people care more their own life.

[ttsujikawa]

Hi profesor Pan, Thank you very much for presenting your research. I am wondering if there is any application of this research in any other country?

[k-partha]

Thank you for presenting Professor Pan! I was wondering if you have any ideas on how your methods could be used to study political censorship in the US - particularly in quantifying the degree to which either side of the political spectrum is censored, seeing as it is a hotly debated question in mainstream news.

[Hai1218]

Thank you for joining our Workshop, Professor Pan. As you might have already known, all social media platforms within China are now required to show the geotag of the user as they post, repost, or comment on the platforms. How do you think the geotagging could alter the current paradigm of information transmission into China? I also feel that future research could pay some attention to comparing the effect of information flow before and after the geotagging mandate was imposed.