Beijing Embraces Big Data to Measure Public Opinion

China is known to have one of the world’s most restrictive internet regimes, with increasingly sophisticated systems in place to snuff out dissent and suppress discussion of controversial topics.

But Beijing policymakers are beginning to see the internet as more than a walled garden, carefully pruned—it’s a source of invaluable information about how netizens feel about the Communist Party’s slate of reforms. The Washington Post’s Simon Denyer reports that party leaders are now getting real-time summaries of online discussions, and “opinion monitoring centers have sprung up in state-run news organizations and universities to mine and interpret the vast rivers of chatter on the Internet.”

A data-driven approach to politics has long been a hallmark of cutting-edge campaigns in western countries—Barack Obama’s re-election campaign famously employed an all-star technology team to optimize messaging and voter turnout—but it’s a new development in China, where a top-down one-party system didn’t leave any room for actually listening to citizens.

Read more at Quartz.

(Image via testing/Shutterstock.com)