The Logic of Informational Repression in China

• In Event: Digital Politics and Entertainment in China: From Repression to Influencers

Abstract

In China, the state has fundamentally changed its information control strategies in response to the growing threat of virality on social media. In this paper, I outline the strategy of informational repression that has been developed to combat this threat. Informational repression is a combination of covert information control and targeted repression that preserves the responsive and informational affordances of social media while mitigating the threat of social media as a conduit for instability through carefully targeted repression and cooptation. In this paper, I outline this strategy using evidence from government documents. I then examine how this strategy works using series of online experiments in China. I find that keeping information control covert is in both the government and private companies’ best interests. These findings suggest that careful and covert information control, when paired with targeted repression, can mitigate the threat of virality while also limiting backlash and chilling effects that can result from heavy-handed censorship.

Author

• Blake Miller, London School of Economics and Political Science