Ed: How much work has been done on censorship of online news in China? What are the methodological challenges and important questions associated with this line of enquiry? Sonya: Recent research is paying much attention to social media and aiming to quantify their censorial practices and to discern common patterns in them. Among these empirical studies, Bamman et al.’s (2012) work claimed to be “the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship” that investigates messages deleted from Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent to Twitter. On an even larger scale, King et al. (2013) collected data from nearly 1,400 Chinese social media platforms and analysed the deleted messages. Most studies on news censorship, however, are devoted to narratives of special cases, such as the closure of Freeing Point, an outspoken news and opinion journal, and the blocking of the New York Times after it disclosed the wealth possessed by the family of Chinese former premier Wen Jiabao. The shortage of news censorship research could be attributed to several methodological challenges. First, it is tricky to detect censorship to begin with, given the word ‘censorship’ is one of the first to be censored. Also, news websites will not simply let their readers hit a glaring “404 page not found”. Instead, they will use a “soft 404”, which returns a “success” code for a request of a deleted web page and takes readers to a (different) existing web page. While humans may be able to detect these soft 404s, it will be harder for computer programs (eg run by researchers) to do so. Moreover, because different websites employ varying soft 404 techniques, much labor is required to survey them and to incorporate the acquired knowledge into a generic monitoring tool. Second, high computing power and bandwidth are required to handle the large amount of news publications and the slow network access to Chinese websites. For instance, NetEase alone publishes 8,000 – 10,000 news…