Introduction

China has four million websites, with nearly 700 million Internet users, 1.2 billion mobile phone users, 600 million WeChat and Weibo users, and generates 30 billion pieces of information every day. It is not possible to apply censorship to this enormous amount of data. Thus censorship is not the correct word choice. But no censorship does not mean no management.

— Lu Wei, Former Director, State Internet Information Office, China, December 2015

1.1 THE PUZZLE OF POROUS CENSORSHIP

As more people around the world gain access to the Internet, government censorship seems an increasingly futile exercise. Traditional conceptions of censorship that could completely control information, such as watertight bans on access, prepublication review, or government-enforced prohibitions on content, seem silly when you consider that every second millions of Internet users around the world are sending one another instant messages, participating in online forums, and tweeting to hundreds of thousands of followers. Even the world's most famous censors recognize this reality. As the former "gatekeeper of the Chinese Internet" Lu Wei stresses in the epigraph to this chapter, the thirty billion pieces of information generated each day by Chinese citizens quite simply cannot be censored.

Yet recognizing the impossibility of complete control of online discourse has not kept authoritarian regimes from spending billions of dollars trying. On the face of it, authoritarian efforts of information control seem halfhearted. Even censorship in one of the most sophisticated censorship regimes in the world — China — could be seen as faltering attempts at "information management." For the most part, these efforts at censorship are porous — frequently circumvented by savvy Internet users, accidentally evaded by citizens wasting time on the web, and rarely enforced with punishment.

Indeed, most censorship methods implemented by the Chinese government act not as a ban but as a tax on information, forcing users to pay money or spend more time if they want to access the censored material. For example, when the government "kicked out" Google from China in 2010, it did so simply by throttling the search engine so it loaded only 75 percent of the time. If you wanted to use Google, you just had to be a bit more patient. The Great Firewall, China's most notorious censorship invention that blocks a variety of foreign websites from Chinese users, can be circumvented by savvy Internet users by downloading a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Social media users in China circumvent keyword censoring of social media posts by substituting similar words that go undetected for words that the government blocks, making content easy to find if you spend more time searching. Newspapers are often instructed by censors to put stories on the back pages of the newspaper, where access is just a few more flips of the page away.

Porous censorship is not unique to China or even to the modern time period. Instead of shutting off the whole Internet, Iran has been known to simply throttle it and make it slower during elections. The Russian government uses armies of online bots and commentators to flood opposition hashtags and make it more difficult, but not impossible, for people to find information on protests or opposition leaders. Even before the Internet, in the late nineteenth century, British censors banned translations of French literature they considered obscene, but allowed untranslated versions to circulate freely, allowing unlimited access to those willing to expend the effort to read them in French. In East Germany during the cold war, the government decided against enforcing restrictions on satellite dishes that enabled citizens to watch West German television, effectively allowing East Germans who were interested enough to find a way to buy a satellite dish to have access to it.

Why do governments attempt to control information when these controls are easily circumvented? Conventional wisdom posits that these porous censorship strategies are futile for governments as citizens learn quickly to circumvent censorship that is not complete or enforced. Many have stressed that information, which is often called "non-excludable" because it is easily shared, is difficult to control once it has become known to a portion of the public, as it can spread quickly. "Information wants to be free," originally coined by Stewart Brand, captures the idea that information technology makes information easy to copy and thus difficult to control. More puzzling is that many governments have the capacity to enforce censorship more forcefully, but choose not to do so. Periodic VPN crackdowns indicate that China could make the Firewall less permeable, but much of the time the government chooses not to. The government could implement draconian punishments for those who evade censorship, creating strong disincentives for circumvention, but most circumvention is not even illegal. Using censorship that taxes, rather than prohibits, information in China — and in other countries around the world — seems to be a design choice, not an operational flaw — but why?

1.2 DISTRACTION AND DIVERSION

In this book, I shed light on the puzzle of porous censorship by showing that even easily circumventable censorship has an important impact on information access for the typical person in most circumstances, and, for this very reason, is strategically useful for authoritarian regimes. Many censorship methods require citizens to spend more time or money accessing information that the government would like to slow down. Only a minority of citizens who are interested enough in the information and have the education and resources to pay the costs of evasion are motivated and equipped enough to circumvent censorship. For the majority of citizens, who are less interested in politics and are not willing to spend significant time becoming informed, small costs of access and government distractions can divert citizens to information that is less dangerous to the regime. Even though it is possible to access most information, as normal citizens get lost in the cacophony of information available to them, their consumption of information is highly influenced by the costs of obtaining it. I argue that there are massively different implications for the spread of political information of having certain information completely free and easy to obtain as compared to being available but slightly more difficult to access.

Part of the inconsistency between conventional wisdom about censorship and the reality of censorship results from the lack of conceptual clarity about the mechanisms by which censorship affects the public's consumption of information. We lack a theory of censorship. I provide a typology of the three ways in which censorship can affect individuals. What most people think of when they think of censorship is fear — threats of punishment, such as losing a job, prison, or worse — which may deter citizens from spreading or accessing information. Fear works by prohibiting particular information and through this inducing self-censorship. But the threat of punishment must be observable to be credible — those who are not aware of punishment cannot be deterred by it. Although fear is a more complete form of censorship because it can be enforced, fear is problematic for authoritarian regimes because it can cause backlash, draw attention to censored information, and create information-gathering problems for governments. Fear is more difficult to use in the digital age because prohibitions on information are difficult for governments to enforce when information is easily copied.

The other two less well-known censorship mechanisms I introduce — friction and flooding — have proven themselves more useful in the age of the Internet. Friction — increasing the costs, either in time or money, of access or spread of information — diverts citizens' attention by imposing barriers to information access. A slow webpage, a book removed from a library, reordered search results, or a blocked website can all be used to increase the costs of access to information. Friction is often circumventable — it can be evaded simply by sustaining these costs. However, it does not have to be observable in order to work and therefore can more easily be explained away or go unnoticed. Friction's counterpart, flooding, is information coordinated as distraction, propaganda, or confusion, such as astroturfing, online propaganda, or government-mandated newspaper articles. Flooding competes with information that authoritarian governments would like to hide by diluting it and distracting from it. As with the friction mechanism, while flooding can be discounted or avoided, flooding requires the consumer to take time and effort to separate out good information from bad information.

I offer a wide range of empirical evidence — from online experiments to nationally representative surveys, datasets of millions of geo-located social media posts, and leaked propaganda archives — to show that friction and flooding effectively divert and distract most people away from censored information. Even though a minority of people will pay the costs to circumvent censorship, friction and flooding are useful to governments because they separate those who are willing to pay the cost of evasion from those who are not, enabling the government to target repression toward the most influential media producers while avoiding widespread repressive policies. I focus my empirical evidence on the citizen production and consumption of information on the Chinese Internet. China is a nearly ideal case for testing how each mechanism of censorship affects citizens' consumption of information and political behavior because the Chinese government implements a wide variety of censorship tactics, which function through each of the three censorship mechanisms. Furthermore, China's censorship system has become the model for many authoritarian regimes: evidence exists that others are trying to emulate it. A better understanding of how the Chinese censorship system works will allow us to predict the future impacts of information control across a wide range of authoritarian regimes.

Censorship is difficult to study empirically because it is often intended to go undetected. Recently, entire subfields in computer science have emerged dedicated to detecting censorship because governments are not typically forthcoming with their tactics. In this book, I move beyond what is censored to take up the challenging task of measuring individuals' reactions to censorship while they are being subjected to it. Using large social media datasets, measures of the spread of online information, online experiments, and surveys, I answer the questions: How do individuals react when observing censorship? How does Internet users' behavior change when particular pieces of information are more difficult to access? Are Internet users who come across distracting online propaganda likely to spread and share it? The evidence I present shows that although many people are resistant to censorship when they notice and observe it, they are very affected by it when they are inconvenienced by it, do not notice it, or can explain it away.

My findings of how censorship influences individuals may explain why we see so many regimes using porous censorship strategies even though these methods are easy to thwart. Although many would see the fact that a minority of capable citizens can route around censorship as detrimental to the regime's censorship efforts, I argue that circumventible censorship can be useful to authoritarian regimes precisely because it has different effects on different segments of the population. Porous censorship drives a wedge between the elite and the masses. The savvy members of the elite easily circumvent censorship, discount propaganda, read blocked information, and enter into banned social networks. By contrast, friction and flooding prey on the rest of the public's short attention spans, busy schedules, and general lack of interest in politics, nudging them toward an information environment that is disconnected from their more well-educated, well-to-do, and politically sophisticated counterparts. By separating the elite from the masses, the government prevents coordination of the core and the periphery, known to be an essential component in successful collective action. Although a portion of savvy and politically concerned citizens may be willing to pay the costs imposed by friction and flooding, less interested individuals often are not, making wider discontent among the broader population significantly less likely and reducing the accountability of political entities.

The strategy of porous censorship allows the government to avoid widespread use of observable repression, which is well known to spark popular backlash. Autocrats face significant trade-offs when making citizens fearful of speaking out. Highly constraining forms of censorship that operate through deterrence must be observable to their targets; otherwise deterrence cannot work. As I will show using social media data, surveys, and online experiments, when censorship is observable, political entities call attention to the information they would like to make off-limits. The observation of censorship intended to create deterrence can instead create opportunities for push-back, signal government weakness, and create increased interest in the off-limits topic. Repression that deters citizens from speaking out also creates information and surveillance problems for the government, as governments often rely on input from the media and population to identify local corruption and on information in the public sphere to identify new pockets of dissent.

Incomplete censorship, by contrast, is more easily masked by political entities, giving the government the cover of plausible deniability. Flooding can front as concerned citizens who are voluntarily writing pro-government content online or are spontaneously gathering in a pro-government parade, and friction can front as technological errors or algorithmic quirks, which ordinary citizens may not be aware of or may explain away. If a link on the Internet redirects to an error page, it is difficult to tell whether the page is down or the government has blocked it. If a book is missing from a library shelf, is it lost, not ordered, or removed by the government? If a social media post does not appear in a news feed, is it because the algorithm predicts you might not be interested in it, or because of government manipulation? Because information is widespread and has many substitutes, small impediments to reading information and even silly distractions can significantly affect users' consumption of political information.

The strategy of porous censorship does, however, have an Achilles' heel. Although for most citizens most of the time, small impediments to accessing information and government-encouraged distractions can divert them to more benign information, there are cases when the typical citizen will take the time to seek out restricted information and evade censorship. I show that in periods of crisis, such as the 2015 Tianjin explosion, citizens are more likely to spend time seeking out methods of accessing restricted information. Similarly, when censorship is imposed suddenly and disrupts habits, such as the case of the Instagram block during the 2014 Hong Kong protests, citizens are more likely to find ways to continue consuming information and entertainment to which they are accustomed. Thus, the strategy of porous censorship can be counterproductive and dangerous to the regime when it uses this censorship too decisively during times it needs censorship most. If information were to disrupt the Chinese political system, it would be during a period when the majority of people were willing to pay the price imposed by censorship to collectively inform themselves.

1.3 IMPLICATIONS AND CHALLENGES TO CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

The findings I present in this book challenge many conventional notions of censorship and have implications for research in digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication.

Censorship Is More Than Fear

First, this book speaks to the strategies that modern autocracies use to prevent large-scale dissent. Many scholars have puzzled over the resilience of some authoritarian regimes. Some argue that the resilience of autocracies is due in part to successful repression; that autocrats have survived by forcefully extinguishing opposition groups. Others have maintained that autocrats are successful in part by creating institutions that are better able to share power with the opposition and respond to citizens' concerns. Still others have credited authoritarian resilience to brainwashing or enforced symbolism, through cultlike nationalism, religion, or ideology.