TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Eveline Chao has one of the better overviews of China’s Internet censorship I’ve seen:

Sina Weibo users can post anything they like, and often sensitive posts will even appear in their personal feed, but the post is blocked from search results. In other words, a user might have no idea their post has been “disappeared” and their friends and other users can’t see the post in their feeds. After a term has been unblocked, it quietly reappears in users’ feeds and search results.

Because what’s censored and how it’s censored is not uniform, the effect on speech may be even worse than a strict program for censoring defined topics in every case. Since people aren’t always sure what’s going to be censored (or in some cases, if it is censorship at all), there’s a freezing effect. You can get around a well-defined censorship program, but it’s much harder to get around one that is always changing.