> Once the public becomes aware of censorship, they stop censoring. Not in my experience. The usual cycle on Weibo is that some sensitive news breaks, e.g. by

> Once the public becomes aware of censorship, they stop censoring. Not in my experience. The usual cycle on Weibo is that some sensitive news breaks, e.g. by eyewitnesses posting videos. This gathers attention until related hashtags start trending, at which point the Weibo censors notice it and remove the trending hashtags. Afterwards, you can still use a direct search to find posts about the event, but only if you already know about it. If you repeat the search, you'll notice search results disappearing or having their pictures removed. Some time later, the first post for searches about e.g. the time and location of the event will return some official statement, with the comment section disabled. Some other search terms will still turn up posts from the first wave of activity, but after a day or so those disappear as well. If the event is very sensitive, searches for it get blocked completely, even if awareness is high. For example, one study [0] found that among a sample of Beijing students who neither use VPN nor have a roommate who does, 56% answered a quiz on the Panama Papers correctly. If they had a VPN-using roommate, this increased to 78%. Nonetheless, when I search for "巴拿马文件" on Weibo, I get told there are no search results. [1] [0] http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fall/1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fal... [1] https://s.weibo.com/weibo/%25E5%25B7%25B4%25E6%258B%25BF%25E9%25A9%25AC%25E6%2596%2587%25E4%25BB%25B6 https://s.weibo.com/weibo/%25E5%25B7%25B4%25E6%258B%25BF%25E...