Citizen engagement and the illusion of secrecy: exploring commenter characteristics in censored online news articles

ABSTRACT

We address the conflict between citizenship engagement through news commenting, and censorship needs. News articles often contain forms of censorship to maintain security, with non-identification of individuals a means of information protection. Commonly used is the replacement of a name with a supposedly non-identifying initial, protecting the identity of military personnel, witnesses, minors, victims or suspects who need to be granted anonymity in the public sphere. We seek to understand the characteristics of commenters including awareness of the potential for social media to circumvent censorship, and attitudes towards censorship in news articles. Our study of censored articles collected from online news pages on Facebook, presents insights into participant characteristics including a strong correlation between personal network size and censorship support.

KEYWORDS:

• Information de-censorship
• online news
• citizen engagement
• comments
• censorship
• social networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Inbal Yahav, Social Scientist (PhD 2010) is an assistant professor and Head of Information Systems program at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her main research interest is developing and tuning statistical models to the information systems discipline. In her research work, Dr Yahav combines techniques from Data Mining algorithms, social network analysis, and optimization models to achieve optimized and interpretable statistical models. She applies these methods mainly to health care applications and online social networks. Dr Yahav has presented her work at multiple conferences and has published papers in books and journals, including MIS Quarterly, Production and Operation Management, and Annals of Operations Research. She received her B.A. in Computer Science, her M.Sc in Industrial Engineering from the Israel Institute of Technology, and her PhD in Operations Research and Data Mining from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010. Dr Yahav is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and Big Data journal.

David G. Schwartz is professor of information systems, and former vice-chairman, at the Business School of Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is chairman of the Business School’s Doctoral Program and in co-founded the Entrepreneurship Program that he continues to lead. David has published over 120 research papers, books, book chapters, and editorials in the field of information systems and technologies. His research has appeared in publications such as Information Systems Research, IEEE Intelligent Systems, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), and the Journal of Organizational Behavior. His books include Cooperating Heterogeneous Systems; Internet-Based Knowledge Management and Organizational Memory; and the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management, now in its second edition. David has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Department of Biomedical Informatics (2004); Monash University, Faculty of Information Technology (2007-8); visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury (2016); and visiting scholar at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (2017). From 1998 to 2011 he served as editor-in-chief of the journal Internet Research and is currently an Associate Editor of the European Journal of Information Systems. His main research interests are Cybersecurity, mHealth, Knowledge Management, Social Network Analysis, and Computer-mediated Communications. David has served on the board of directors of multiple public companies including Psagot Investment House, Israel’s leading investment house with over $35B assets under management (Acquired by APAX Partners, 2010); Cham Foods Ltd. (TASE), a multinational producer of ingredients for the food and nutriceutical industries; C.I. Systems (TASE) a producer of electro-optic systems for the military and semiconductor industries; and Copernic (NASDAQ: CNIC), an Internet search innovator (Acquired by DecisionPoint Systems/DPNI, 2010). David received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University, USA; MBA from McMaster University, Canada; and B.Sc. from the University of Toronto, Canada.

ORCID

David G. Schwartz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2125-2069

Notes

1 In fact, privacy setting of “list of friends” is not available under privacy setting, but rather hidden under user’s profile.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology [grant #3-9770] ‘Data Leakage in Social Networks: Detection and Prevention.’