Skeptical. The Chinese government can afford to hire people who have better photoshop skills than this to censor these buildings. Baidu should also be able to do a better job of censorship than this. To me this looks like some kind of algorithmic failure on the part of Baidu, perhaps the output of some convnet designed to remove watermarks and close foreground objects.
There are lots of streetview (or Total View or whatever) images, though. Wouldn't be surprised if done official had said streetview had to be censored and then vastly underestimated how large an undertaking that was, so there's then only a handful of underpaid guys tasked with photoshopping out the whole nation's sensitive infrastructure.
It's so clumsy, it makes me wonder whether it's being done by a poorly written program instead of actual people. For example, it's hard to imagine even a very stupid person cloning a nearby metal roof and not a patch of sky, as is evident in one of the pictures.
Another possibility is that someone's deliberately drawing attention to these structures, using a bit of reverse psychology. If that was their goal, then the fact that we're talking about it means it worked. ;)
It appears that the deletions are related to national security (infrastructural targets). Cooling towers, gas storage, bridges, etc. Although not sure what to make of that heavily guarded fire station. Perhaps it's a front for something.
You mean guarded cause of that little fence and a guard post? Like literally almost every compound in China has these, so definitely wouldn't call it "guarded" by international standards.
Very strange indeed. The Chinese government rarely seem to act as a well oiled machine. This is probably some initiative somebody took that will come to bite them.
It isn't. A lot of commands from above but total local implementation, or even local governments doing their own thing since the emperor is so far away.
