Censorship in China
China is a country with one of the heaviest and most prevalent censorship in the world. With no laws granting people freedom of speech, citizens and journalists alike regularly find that they are unable to criticise the government at all online and in the news.
In a study by Stanford in 2018, 1800 college students were randomly chosen to be given free access to an uncensored internet. The people in the study would not look at the normally censored information at first, but once prompted they would start to show interest in it. Looking at the information made them “more skeptical of the Chinese government, less satisfied with its performance, and more likely to demand changes in Chinese institutions”, so it is not that people don’t care about the censorship, they simply do not know about it. This study gives an example of how censorship makes people more supportive of the government, giving the government more power. However, not all Chinese citizens are against government censorship. Recently this year, Leica, a German camera company, released an ad titled 'The Hunt' showcasing China’s 1989 protests, a heavily censored topic in China. Although it drew support from some human rights activists in China, others did not feel the same. Leica’s Weibo account was filled with negative comments, with users saying “Do you even deserve to collaborate with our patriotic Huawei?” and “Has Leica gone insane? It’s free to look for trouble for itself, but does it want to throw Huawei into a hole too?" Leica has since deleted the video after it drew immense criticism from users online. |
"We find four main results: (i) free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sensitive information; (ii) temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicating that demand is not permanently low; (iii) acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and (iv) social transmission of information is statistically significant but small in magnitude." - Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang in a study by Stanford University A re-upload of the original Leica advertisement as the original has been deleted.
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