China's environment ministry publishes up-to-date air pollution data for roughly 25,000 polluting manufacturing plants nationwide, covering three-quarters of the country's industrial emissions. But it can take months for regulators to follow up on pollution violations. An international team of researchers ran an experiment in China to find out if complaints on social media could help reduce violations, and found that they did —- plants that were targeted by social media complaints on Weibo saw a 62% decrease in violations over the eight-month study period. The World's Environment Correspondent Carolyn Beeler reports.
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