The telltale shape of censorship

Now we can snoop on the snoopers. Donn Morrison at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim created a social network simulation to model what happens when state censors delete swathes of posts. The missing content changed the network in a characteristic way, taking with it links between users that should arise naturally (arxiv.org/abs/1402.5310). Spotting this change could give activists early warning that the censors are active.