TY - GEN
T1 - How We Express Ourselves Freely: Censorship, Self-censorship, and Anti-censorship on a Chinese Social Media
AU - Xie, Jiamu
AU - Wang, Zixin
AU - Shen, Bohui
AU - Zhou, Zhixuan
N1 - KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2023-06-15
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the respondents who contributed to the survey data, and those who helped us distribute the survey. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their good words and insightful feedback. We further thank Yifei Wang, Chuanli Xia, Zijie Shao, among many others, who provided useful feedback in the early stage of the study.
PY - 2023/3/10
Y1 - 2023/3/10
N2 - Censorship, anti-censorship, and self-censorship in an authoritarian regime have been extensively studies, yet the relationship between these intertwined factors is not well understood. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale survey study (N= 526 ) with Sina Weibo users toward bridging this research gap. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis, we uncover how users are being censored, how and why they conduct self-censorship on different topics and in different scenarios (i.e., post, repost, and comment), and their various anti-censorship strategies. We further identify the metrics of censorship and self-censorship, find the influence factors, and construct a mediation model to measure their relationship. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for democratic social media design and future censorship research.
AB - Censorship, anti-censorship, and self-censorship in an authoritarian regime have been extensively studies, yet the relationship between these intertwined factors is not well understood. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale survey study (N= 526 ) with Sina Weibo users toward bridging this research gap. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis, we uncover how users are being censored, how and why they conduct self-censorship on different topics and in different scenarios (i.e., post, repost, and comment), and their various anti-censorship strategies. We further identify the metrics of censorship and self-censorship, find the influence factors, and construct a mediation model to measure their relationship. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for democratic social media design and future censorship research.
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10754/690979
UR - https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_8
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151123161&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_8
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_8
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783031280313
SP - 93
EP - 108
BT - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
PB - Springer Nature Switzerland
ER -