Peng Shuai, one of China’s most popular tennis players, has denied saying she made accusations of sexual assault against a former senior politician on social-media site Weibo.
Her original post was made on 2 November, after which her personal feed was censored, leading to concerns over her well-being.
We’ve looked at the events that followed to understand the online censorship techniques used against Ms Peng.
What happened to Ms Peng’s posts?
She published a post on Weibo on 2 November, alleging she had been coerced into sexual relations with Zhang Gaoli, a former Chinese vice-premier.
In it, Ms Peng said that originally, she hadn’t agreed to a sexual relationship with him and “kept crying,” but eventually she had “agreed.”
That post disappeared quickly – probably within the hour.
Using the Wayback Machine internet tool – which allows you to scroll back in time online – we can see that by the end of that day there was no trace of the post.
We then looked at Ms Peng’s timeline and found that six more posts had gone, and she herself has not posted on Weibo since 2 November.
This isn’t the first time a high-profile athlete has been censored.
