How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression

By Gary King, Jennifer Pan, Margaret E. Roberts. 2013

1,879 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations

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Citations in the corpus

Minimax Optimal Procedures for Locally Private Estimation (2016, methodology): “( We use data identical to that used in the articles (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013, 2014).”
Every tweet counts? How sentiment analysis of social media can improve our knowledge of citizens’ political preferences with an application to Italy and France (2013, background): “Note, however, that the Internet ceases to be a free environment for political debate whenever users are confronted with censorship, such as occurs in authoritarian regimes (King et al., 2012).”
Lying or Believing? Measuring Preference Falsification From a Political Purge in China (2016, methodology): “activist style as documented by many existing studies (King et al., 2013; Yang, 2013).”
WeChat: social and political development of China’s dominant messaging app (2017, background): “In a comprehensive data-driven study, King, Pan, and Roberts (2013) focused on Internet content to examine the targets of government censors.”
#MeToo as Connective Action: A Study of the Anti-Sexual Violence and Anti-Sexual Harassment Campaign on Chinese Social Media in 2018 (2020, background): “As a number of researchers point out (Fu 2017; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; Zheng and Wu 2005) online activism, which can potentially lead to large-scale collective action, has long been a major target of the Chinese authorities’ censorship.”
Empowering activists or autocrats? The Internet in authoritarian regimes (2015, neutral): “1 As the example of China shows, sophisticated suppression of certain types of content can tilt reporting clearly in the government’s favor and eliminate dangerous seeds of discontent (MacKinnon, 2011; King, Pan & Roberts, 2013).”
Protests as Strategic Games: Experimental Evidence from Hong Kong's Antiauthoritarian Movement* (2019, background): “See also Granovetter (1978); Kuran (1989, 1991, 1997); Chwe (2000); Fearon (2011); Kricheli et al. (2011); Egorov and Sonin (2018) for models of protests in which participation is a game of strategic complements. Some recent theoretical work allows for the possibility of strategic substitutability i”
Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda (2017, neutral): “[20] King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E Roberts.”
Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework (2020, methodology): “Other disciplines in the social sciences, including political scientists (Grimmer 2010; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; Schwartz and Ungar 2015) and psychologists (Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010; Yu and Ho 2014), have already incorporated computational methods into their repertoire, adapting a range of…”
Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China (2015, background): “Grassroots activism is not a daily watchdog for political and administrative accountability in the area of pollution control and environmental protection in China, especially when the pollutant is invisible (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013).”
Hiding individuals and communities in a social network (2016, background): “cial networking sites and other internet content is policed, and anti-governmental blogs and activities are censored [17, 18].”
How Social Media Is Changing Conflict (2017, background): “For instance, King, Pan, and Roberts (2013) show that Chinese censors allow dissent on microblogging platforms, but any talk of collective action is censored.”