The best place I've seen that took a technical look at it was a Financial Times piece (I think) where they pointed out that Pooh wasn't actually banned. They then look at the trending post numbers on some Chinese social media site and show the claim for banning made the Pooh images go viral as people proved that it wasn't banned. But then in a massive case of cognitive dissonance, after explicitly showing that the meme was in fact popular for a number of days with a massive number of posts, they claim that the drop off in posts after like 3 days (when the internet usually gets bored with stuff) was because of banning... even though there was still a higher number of Pooh posts than before the viral event. Just like 80% less than at its peak. It looked like any other epidemic line graph after the initial run through the population.
The best place I've seen that took a technical look at it was a Financial Times piece (I think) where they pointed out that Pooh wasn't actually banned. They then look at the trending post numbers on some Chinese social media site and show the claim for banning made the Pooh images go viral as people proved that it wasn't banned. But then in a massive case of cognitive dissonance, after explicitly showing that the meme was in fact popular for a number of days with a massive number of posts, they claim that the drop off in posts after like 3 days (when the internet usually gets bored with stuff) was because of banning... even though there was still a higher number of Pooh posts than before the viral event. Just like 80% less than at its peak. It looked like any other epidemic line graph after the initial run through the population.