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Speaker:
Margaret E. Roberts (University of California, San Diego)

Authoritarian governments around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated technologies for controlling information. In the digital age, many see these efforts as futile, as they are easily thwarted by savvy Internet users who quickly find ways to evade and circumvent them. Censored demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent is enormously effective. Censorship acts like a tax on information, requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access. By creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away, censorship powerfully influences the spread of information and in turn what people know about politics. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, nationally representative surveys, and leaks for China’s Propaganda Department, I find that when Internet users observe censorship they are willing to compensate for it, but when people are less aware of and inconvenienced by censorship, they are very affected by it. I challenge the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship’s porous nature is used to strategically divide the public and target influencers.