The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began—by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms, much like the list of directives to the media I received on my phone. The Internet Affairs Bureau sent out instructions, sometimes several times a day, to websites across the country. A word might be permissible one day and banned the next. Typing it into Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, yielded a message: “Search results are not displayed
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