I think it's better to treat that post as part of the protest (someone supporting the message of the video imagining how it spreads far and wide) than as a reliable source on things like traffic figures (which, realistically, even the authorities can't know because of all the different copies floating around).
Hi, reporter of the story here.
From their paper, it looks like they didn't. "We intentionally keep the language introducing the tool [VPNs] vague to avoid political pressure from the school administration."
The acknowledge a grant by the National Science Foundation of China, so I assume they convinced someone there that knowing more about the effects of censorship would be useful for the government as well.
The researchers made clear that they are "independent of the government." They also assured participants that "we will erase all survey data if we are faced with political pressure to share the data with government or school officials."
They used email and WeChat (similar to WhatsApp) messages to communicate with the students and even hand out free one-year account of Youku (similar to Youtube) to obscure the study's explicit focus on censorship.
That doesn't mean they didn't get approval to do so. Obscuring the focus on censorship is just good study design, since they wanted to find out whether explicitly pointing out that foreign media report differently has an effect.
I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with anything.
I just spent way too long figuring out the NSFC grant system, but I did eventually find the grant acknowledged in the paper. [1]
Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he could have done the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards.
An Inkstone editor here. It's almost always a good idea to follow the money, but I'd argue that there's no better way to determine our impartiality by examining our work. Alibaba owns Inkstone but we've received absolutely no editorial direction from them and/or from any of their executives, including Jack Ma. This editorial independence matters to readers and matters to those of us who work here.
I work for Inkstone, part of SCMP but of a different division from the China and Hong Kong news desks.
You're citing an SCMP article dated April 29, before Taiwan made those remarks, and comparing it with an AFP story published by HKFP on May 10.
How about comparing apples to apples, starting from this May 9 piece by SCMP titled "Taipei will not agree to transfer of Hong Kong murder suspect if Taiwanese citizens risk being sent to mainland China"?
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3009506...
> “Without the removal of threats to the personal safety of [Taiwan] nationals going to or living in Hong Kong caused by being extradited to mainland China, we will not agree to the case-by-case transfer proposed by the Hong Kong authorities,” the council’s deputy minister Chiu Chui-cheng said.
> “We want the relevant suspect to face justice but our government cannot ignore damages to the human rights of our nationals.”
> “We have to ask whether the amendment proposed by the Hong Kong government is politically motivated, as some have speculated,” he said.
The Taiwan government had already mentioned back in March that they would not accept the bill, would potentially issue a travel alert on HK if it were passed, and that their requests to the Kong Kong government for assistance in the murder had been ignored three times.
The article selections put forwrad may not be ideal, but the point regarding the SCMP remains. I appreciate that as a writer you likely strive to present the truth in a balanced way, but the reality of the ownership structure of the SCMP cannot be ignored.
Let's not forget the Zhao Wei interview, the Gui Minhai interview, and the various SCMP staff/contributor resignations over exactly this issue. To quote one:
Totally not ignoring the ownership structure of the SCMP. As I said earlier in another comment in this thread, following the money is almost always a good idea. But I invite readers to decide for themselves by examining the goods, not just the money behind it. This applies to every publication that has an owner or a leader.
I appreciate that you acknowledged the comparison wasn't ideal.
Zhao Wei, Gui Minhai, and staff resignations are all issues people have raised over and over again, and I think the scrutiny is justified. I wasn't around when those things happened, though, so I don't know more than you do.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning.
Writer of the articles, and an editor of Inkstone here. Thank you so much for the comment. You're describing exactly what that piece sought to do: a quick look at the views of the main stakeholders. You may also be interested in a thread I tweeted yesterday that goes a little deeper into the tensions behind the extradition bill: https://twitter.com/alanwongw/status/1138670655480639490
[1] https://twitter.com/syhily/status/1517868079648104449