Dubious until officially censored: Effects of online censorship exposure on viewers’ attitudes in authoritarian regimes

ABSTRACT

Authoritarian regimes use censorship to prevent people from accessing unfavorable content. We argue that censorship, when detected by citizens, will have an adverse impact on their assessment of the government because censorship signals the government’s inability to address the issue being censored. Using an online survey experiment conducted in China, we find that censorship awareness significantly decreases people’s willingness to seek assistance from the government when needs arise. In addition, our survey respondents find a piece of news more credible when they believe that it is censored by the state. The findings suggest that censorship likely lowers people’s evaluation of the government’s problem-solving ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Information manipulation
• online censorship
• government effectiveness
• China
• authoritarian regimes
• social media
• political attitudes

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. A typical procedure is as follows: a researcher scrapes the online contents of some target sites at time t. At time t + 1, the researcher revisits the site and checks if the contents still exist. Nonexistence suggests contents being censored.

2. The four-level scale ranges from 1. “least effective” to 5. “most effective”. For the exact wording of this question, see Appendix 2d.

3. We treat the sequence of four scenarios as a time series variable ranging from the first scenario to the fourth scenario.

4. Note that the credibility rating of five pieces of news was included as one control variable. We aggregate it as an ordinal variable ranging from 5 to 25.

5. Individual i’s choice of Deleted by Sender is the baseline for comparison.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an internal grant of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Notes on contributors

Stan Hok-Wui Wong

Stan Hok-Wui Wong is an associate professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interest includes authoritarian politics and public opinions. He is the principal investigator of the Hong Kong Election Study.

Jiachen Liang

Mr. LIANG Jiachen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interest focuses on media politics in China, including the behavior of social media users and online information regulations.