The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?

By Yuyu Chen, David Y. Yang. The American Economic Review, 2019

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We track subjects’ media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, economic beliefs, political attitudes, and behaviors over 18 months. We find four main results: (i) free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sensitive information; (ii) temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicating that demand is not permanently low; (iii) acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and (iv) social transmission of information is statistically significant but small in magnitude. We calibrate a simple model to show that the combination of low demand for uncensored information and the moderate social transmission means China’s censorship apparatus may remain robust to a large number of citizens receiving access to an uncensored internet. (JEL C93, D72, D83, L82, L86, L88, P36)

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/120d72615959c560ba26d4b7fbc250c306c96d17

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth
4. Ro’ee Levy
5. Eddie Yang
6. Margaret E. Roberts

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth
4. Ro’ee Levy
5. Eddie Yang
6. Margaret E. Roberts

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Johannes Wohlfart
2. Christopher Roth
3. Ingar K. Haaland
4. Ro’ee Levy
5. Eddie Yang
6. Margaret E. Roberts

Citations in the corpus

• Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2020, background): “Methodologically, this paper contributes to a growing literature conducting online media-related experiments (Allcott et al., 2019; Bail et al., 2018; Chen and Yang, 2019; Jo, 2018) by demonstrating how an experiment can exploit social media’s existing infrastructure to gradually distribute news to ”
• Censorship of Online Encyclopedias: Implications for NLP Models (2021, background): “While mainland Chinese Internet users can access Chinese language Wikipedia with a Virtual Private Network (VPN), evidence suggests that very few do [9, 32].”
• Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “Chen et al. (2010) find that personalized social information can significantly increase digital public goods provision, in the form of user moving ratings and community database maintenance. Chen et al. (2017) conduct a field experiment with 75,000 drivers, establishing that social information can r”