Meta-information censorship and the creation of the Chinanet Bubble

ABSTRACT

The question of who controls meta-information online has become a hot-button issue with profound political implications. The present article explores how state-led online censorship in the People’s Republic of China can create information bubbles, and how it is possible to analyze them. The article is based on a systematic comparison between 3,000 Google.com and Baidu.com image search results on a series of selected, potentially sensitive, keywords. This allows us to discern how censorship and information bubbles are connected, and how it is possible to detect and analyze them. To facilitate this, we offer a typology for conceptualizing the different dimensions of internet censorship. Our analysis points to the importance of censorship on meta-information and suggests that generally censored internet contents can also spill over to a liberal context through the Sinophone internet.

KEYWORDS:

• Censorship
• information bubbles
• meta-information
• Baidu
• China
• internet

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Lauri Paltemaa is Professor and director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku.

Juha A. Vuori is Professor of International Politics at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University.

Mikael Mattlin is a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History, and Political Science, University of Turku.

Jouko Katajisto is a Lecturer at the Department of Statistics, University of Turku.

Notes

1 These are upholding the socialist path, people’s democratic dictatorship, Marxist-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, and the leadership of the CCP.

2 This means that the pages where the images were retrieved from were not analyzed. Text was analyzed only in cases where the text was embedded in the image as such.

3 Available from the authors.

4 These were the Global Times, Baike, Gov.cn, Chinanews, Xinhua, CGTN, People.cn, China Daily, China Times, CCTV, CNR, CRI, Baidu-associated newsfeed pages, Sohu, and all domains ending with gov.cn.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland: [grant number 323704].