Distinguished Speaker Series: Gary King ’80 ’10 HON shares findings on Chinese government’s censorship of social media posts
The SUNY New Paltz Distinguished Speaker Series welcomed back SUNY New Paltz alumnus Gary King ’80 ’10 HON, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, for its fall 2024 lecture on Oct. 15.
Well-regarded for his expertise in developing and applying empirical methods in many areas of social science, King delivered an engaging talk in the style of a classroom lecture detailing how he worked with Harvard students to understand the Chinese government’s censorship of social media posts.
Monitoring a billion social media posts per day, the Chinese government is currently enacting what King refers to as “the largest effort to suppress human expression in the history of the world.”
“If you study things at scale like we did with millions of posts, you can see patterns you couldn’t see otherwise,” he said. “You can see the footprints of the government.”
The Harvard University professor and his team embarked on a massive undertaking to download all posts in the region before the government could find them. They also created a company that mirrored Facebook for their own posts, since the social media giant is banned in the country. Through this experiment, they discovered what he called the nuances of the Chinese government, namely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s large-scale effort to tamp down on human expression.
What the team concluded through their comprehensive study was that individual criticism of the CCP is permissible to an extent, but anything that inspires collective action gets suppressed immediately.
“They would like people to stay in their houses and not talk to each other,” he said. “Here in the U.S., we encourage protests on either side to some degree, but there is no other side in China.”
King’s appearance as this fall’s Distinguished Speaker continues an extensive record of engagement with his alma mater. He is the namesake of The Benjamin Center’s Gary King Visiting Lecturer in Applied Social Research series, an annual event made possible through philanthropy. He had previously addressed SUNY New Paltz graduates as the 2010 Commencement speaker.
About the Distinguished Speaker Series
The SUNY New Paltz Distinguished Speaker Series connects the University’s alumni, community members, faculty, staff, students and their families with well-known authors, policy makers, scientists, media experts, business leaders and other luminaries.
The Distinguished Speaker Series is made possible by the SUNY New Paltz Foundation. The fall 2024 program was presented with support from the SUNY New Paltz Department of Political Science, Campus Auxiliary Services, M&T Bank, Sodexo, SUNY Ulster, the Ulster Community College Foundation, Inc., Ulster Savings Bank, Woodland Pond and America’s Best Value Inn at New Paltz.