Having lived in China and experienced the Great Firewall of China firsthand, I've always wondered what role Baidu and other firms like it play in controlling th

Having lived in China and experienced the Great Firewall of China firsthand, I've always wondered what role Baidu and other firms like it play in controlling the conversation and identifying dissidents. It would not surprise me if Baidu plays a large role in not only in providing search like Google but specifically tailoring those results to be inline with the content the Party would like the people to see and uses it's crawling and machine learning ability to identify dissidents. This is of course speculative based on my own experience with the Firewall and seeing the degree to which companies located within the PRC need to cooperate, but it wouldn't surprise me if machine learning techniques are already used in such a capacity. Does anyone here that know a lot more about Baidu have any information supporting or refuting such speculation? I know Google has already ventured into this territory with it's autocomplete word blacklist[0] and modified results for terms like torrents. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513