Glitch Cities: Buildings, Mysteriously Deleted from Chinese Street View

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.

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.

To me it looks like hand drawn masks + a batch script for something like photoshops auto-fill "healing brush tool".

(photoshops tool actually handles edges differently though, so it's not that)

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.

Wow. The implementation is so bad, it's actually highlighting sensitive infrastructure.