“COVID-19 Increased Censorship Circumvention and Access to Sensitive Topics in China”, Keng-Chi Chang, William R. Hobbs, Margaret E. Roberts, Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld2022-01-25 (; similar)⁠:

We study the impact of crisis on information seeking in authoritarian regimes. Using digital trace data from China during the COVID-19 crisis, we show that crisis motivates citizens to seek out crisis-related information, which subsequently exposes them to unrelated and potentially regime-damaging information. This gateway to both current and historically sensitive content is not found for individuals in countries without extensive online censorship. While information seeking increases during crisis under all forms of governance, the added gateway to previously unknown and sensitive content is disproportionate in authoritarian contexts.

Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert substantial control over access to media.

The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored.

Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.

[Keywords: censorship, political science, political communication]

[Consistent with “The Impact of Media Censorship: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in China”, Chen & Yang2018; cf. local optima, copyright]

See Also: