When Citizens Demand More Censorship

• In Event: Repression and Censorship

Abstract

Existing research on information manipulation in authoritarian contexts generally focus on the regime’s censorship strategies and the citizens’ circumvention of censorship. However, despite the stringent information control in China, extensive observational evidence suggests that social media users in China may sometimes prefer greater levels of censorship. Users may flag and report (jubao) others’ postings for political reasons, and a number of postings are deleted after wide circulation online, presumably because of user reports. Many users also complain about the alleged insufficiency of censorship on certain social media platforms. This phenomenon is puzzling, as some citizens do not simply dismiss or refute a message that they do not approve but instead prefer a more costly approach of seeking its disappearance, which apparently does not increase their utility and may backfire and eventually lead to the censorship of information of interest to them. Unlike traditional physical forms of peer-to-peer surveillance fostered or encouraged by certain authoritarian regimes in history, those who flag and report others’ social media posts do not obtain benefits from the government. In fact, many of the social media users who flag and report content are liberal-leaning and demand the removal of pro-regime or nationalist information. 

In this project, we propose a theory to account for the widespread approach of flagging and reporting. Our theory characterizes this demand for more censorship as a general equilibrium effect of information control: When censorship has become an established part of their information environment, people will utilize it in ways that may not be in accordance with the interests or intention of the authoritarian regime that prescribes censorship in the first place, or the social media platforms that (are delegated by the regime to) implement it. This includes facilitating the deletion of posts that they believe “ought” to disappear from social media platforms — although they themselves do not believe in (and will not be affected by) their content, the existence of these posts will influence other actors with prior beliefs and/or incentives different from theirs, and this community-level effect will jeopardize their utility more than the discounted risk of censorship being strengthened in the future at their expense. In other words, the demand for greater censorship originates from the establishment of restrictive norms under information control, and it serves to affect the belief or action of others, rather than the demanders themselves: In an information environment where censorship is the unshakable status quo, people may approve of and/or actively seek more censorship if it can prevent the information they regard as inaccurate, inappropriate, or offensive from being seen by others, including those with uninformative priors (the masses) and those in a politically opposing out-group who may exploit the information to the detriment of their in-group interests. 

We conduct two sets of survey- and field-experiments that empirically examine the two major propositions of our theory. In the first set of experiments, we randomize background information that includes different framing of the extent of social media censorship in China, so that the respondents in the treatment group will tend to perceive censorship as significantly more prevalent than those in the control group. Then we incentivize respondents to closely follow multiple social media accounts we created for an extended period of time, during which we publish various political postings, including excessive criticism and praises of the Chinese government, and other polarizing contents on the account. Then we elicit the respondents’ desire to get a posting removed and their actual action of reporting. In the second set of experiments, we randomize 1) the reception of social media postings, including the numbers of “like”s and reposts, 2) the respondents’ perception of the postings’ audience, including the political knowledge, attitudes, and motivations of the account’s followers, and 3) the respondents’ perception of external threats, including foreign government’s attitudes toward China. We then elicit the respondents’ censorship desire and actions from surveys. Finally, we inquire about their thought on the current censorship policies — whether they would ideally desire more, less, or equal amounts of censorship as practiced in the status quo. 

Our research contributes to the comparative politics literature by laying out an important downstream effect of authoritarian information control that alters citizen behavior as they adapt to the equilibrium of a censored information environment, the end result of which may lead to more censorship than intended by the regime. Our research also has policy implications relevant to social media companies and regulators in democracies, where content moderation has become an increasingly pressing issue. 

Authors

• Qitong Cao, Stanford Graduate School of Business

• Yunpeng Bai, Yale University