Our APIs (application programming interfaces) allow you to obtain the past 7 days censored articles of WeChat public accounts for use in your own applications. If you are new to WeChatscope and want some help getting started with your research, here is the tutorial.
Method 1: Use our Base URL to search for records in past 7 days held by Wechatscope
Search our catalog, using Base URL
https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk/api/update_weixin_public_pretty?days={number}
Note: Curly braces { } indicate required item
Example: Access to censored articles from the last 2 days
https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk/api/update_weixin_public_pretty?days=2
Example: Access to censored articles from the last 7 days
https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk/api/update_weixin_public_pretty?days=7
When you search Base URL you will get a list of records that match your search time period. They are the latest censored WeChat articles either blocked by Chinese censors or removed by the account holders that they are not accessible from the internet.
Unfortunately, we are not available to support full-text keyword search at the moment.
Understanding your search results
The display for search results is made up of a list of record descriptions, ranked in a chronological order. The format is as follows:
- “url”: URL address of the WeChat article
- “title”: Title of the article in original language
- “title_eng”: Title of the article in English (Google Translate)
- “nickname”: Name of the WeChat public account
- “created_at”: Publish date of the article
- “Archive”: Webpage archive file name for the use of html API (see below)
- “censored_date”: Censored date of the article
- “censored_msg”: Reason for censorship according to WeChat
- “update_date”: the latest record updated time
Method 2: Use R code
# update_weixin API ————————————————————
library(httr)
library(data.table)
# The URL of the update_weixin API
url_wxupdate <- ‘https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk/api/update_weixin_public?days=’
# Send API request: 2 = censored info in the past two days
ceninfo <- GET(url = paste0(url_wxupdate,2))
# Process content of the API request
ceninfo_content <- content(ceninfo)
# Convert the content to a dataframe
ceninfo_df <- rbindlist(ceninfo_content, fill=TRUE)
# ————————————————————————————-
How to view the censored articles?
You can view the articles by placing the {archive} of the article on the following link.
https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk/api/html?fn={archive}
Note: Curly braces { } indicate required item
Can’t view the picture in article? Write to us.