[5] The United States magazine Quartz reported that one of the three founders of the site, "Charlie Smith", said out of concern about the CCP's censorship, they established in 2011 the Chinese website GreatFire with the aim to provide a resource to clearly show what was blocked.

They would manually remove content deemed sensitive, as automatic filtering cannot catch all such posts.

Many comments are live for a few minutes or even hours before they are reviewed and deleted, so FreeWeibo makes use of this loophole and collect those posts.

"Charlie Smith" said that they copy every Sina Weibo post, but this approach requires a huge storage capacity.

According to the Deutsche Welle report, to access the FreeWeibo page from within China, people must use VPN software to bypass the authorities.