According to a New York Times report, the recent train crash in China’s Zhejiang Province has sparked a flurry of free(er) expression on China’s weibos, Twitter-like microblogging services. While censors monitor weibos and remove content, their fast-paced nature makes it more difficult to control the influx of posts.


With official government orders for media groups not to report on the crash, the content on the various weibo platforms seems to only have increased. In a recent interview with On the Media Danwei.org founder Jeremy Goldkorn has stated that “so far, social media has beaten back government propaganda.”