In his latest research study, Jason Q. Ng investigated how Tencent’s WeChat, the leading mobile chat app in the country, restricts information on its public accounts platform—a growing social media blogging alternative to Sina Weibo. After performing a systematic collection of tens of thousands of WeChat public posts, he analyzed the types of content removed by WeChat on its public accounts platform. Jason Ng will present what this collection of deleted posts reveals as well as his past and future research into how citizens and tech companies respond to Internet censorship.

Jason Q. Ng, a research fellow at The Citizen Lab—an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto, is exploring the intersection between technology, global security, and human rights. Also a research consultant at China Digital Times, Ng helps develop censorship monitoring tools.

He teaches a class on digital activism at Columbia SIPA and has also taught at Yale University. Jason Ng is the author of Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s “China Real Time,” Technology Review, and Foreign Affairs. His research has been featured in Le Monde, BBC World Service and Vice. Ng was previously a Google Policy Fellow and a book editor at The New Press and Metropolitan Books. He graduated from Brown University and studied East Asian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pierre Landry, Professor of Political Science and Director of Global China Studies, will be introducing Jason Ng.