1,721,005 research outputs found
Replication Data for: How Market Dynamics of Domestic and Foreign Social Media Firms Shape Strategies of Internet Censorship
No full textThere is ongoing debate over whether authoritarian regimes can maintain control over
information given the rise of social media and the Internet. In this debate, China is
often cited as a prime example of how authoritarian regimes can retain control, but to
date, there has been limited research on whether China’s online censorship strategies
can be replicated in other authoritarian regimes. This article shows that China’s ability
to censor social media rests on the dominance of domestic firms in China’s market for
Internet content. The absence of U.S. social media firms in China allows the Chinese
government to engage in censorship through content removal, which can quickly and
effectively suppress information. In contrast, for most other regimes, the market for
social media is dominated by U.S. multinational firms, e.g., Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, and in these contexts, content removal is an immense challenge. This article
then examines the prospects of instituting content removal by developing domestic
social media or importing Chinese platforms, and finds that most authoritarian regimes
are unlikely to be able to duplicate China’s online censorship efforts
Replication Data for: How Chinese Officials Use the Internet to Construct their Public Image
No full textThe Chinese regime has launched a number of online government transparency initiatives to increase the volume of publicly available information about the activities of lower level governments. By analyzing online content produced by local government officials to fulfill these transparency requirements—a random sample of 1.92 million county-level government web pages—this paper shows how websites are commandeered by local-level officials to construct their public image. The majority of content on government websites emphasizes either the competence or benevolence of county executives, depending on where leaders are in the political tenure cycle. Early tenure county executives project images of benevolence by emphasizing their attentiveness and concern toward citizens. Late tenure executives project images of competence by highlighting their achievements. These findings shift the nature of debates concerning the role of the Internet in authoritarian regimes from a focus on regime-society interactions to an examination of dynamics among regime insiders. By focusing on communication and the flow of information between upper-level leaders and lower-level regime agents, this paper reveals how the Internet becomes a vehicle of self-promotion for local politicians
Replication Data for: How Chinese Officials Use the Internet to Construct their Public Image
No full textThe Chinese regime has launched a number of online government transparency initiatives to increase the volume of publicly available information about the activities of lower level governments. By analyzing online content produced by local government officials to fulfill these transparency requirements—a random sample of 1.92 million county-level government web pages—this paper shows how websites are commandeered by local-level officials to construct their public image. The majority of content on government websites emphasizes either the competence or benevolence of county executives, depending on where leaders are in the political tenure cycle. Early tenure county executives project images of benevolence by emphasizing their attentiveness and concern toward citizens. Late tenure executives project images of competence by highlighting their achievements. These findings shift the nature of debates concerning the role of the Internet in authoritarian regimes from a focus on regime-society interactions to an examination of dynamics among regime insiders. By focusing on communication and the flow of information between upper-level leaders and lower-level regime agents, this paper reveals how the Internet becomes a vehicle of self-promotion for local politicians
Replication Data for: Concealing Corruption: How Chinese Officials Distort Upward Reporting of Online Grievances
No full textA prerequisite for the durability of authoritarian regimes as well as their effective governance is the regime's ability to gather reliable information about the actions of lower-tier officials. Allowing public participation in the form of online complaints is one approach authoritarian regimes have taken to improve monitoring of lower-tier officials.
In this paper, we gain rare access to internal communications between a monitoring agency and upper-level officials in China. We show that citizen grievances posted publicly online that contain complaints of corruption are systematically concealed from upper-level authorities when they implicate lower-tier officials or associates connected to lower-tier officials through patronage ties. Information manipulation occurs primarily through omission of wrongdoing rather than censorship or falsification, suggesting that even in the digital age, in a highly determined and capable regime where reports of corruption are actively and publicly voiced, monitoring the behavior of regime agents remains a challenge
Replication Data for: Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility
No full textThe proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for governments to expand their focus beyond propaganda content in order to disseminate propaganda effectively. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda. We show that such a strategy is used across China by combining ethnography with a computational analysis of a novel dataset of the titles of 197,303 propaganda posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We find that Chinese propagandists face intense pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness on social media because their work is heavily quantified---measured, analyzed, and ranked---with metrics such as views and likes. Propagandists use both clickbait and non-propaganda content (e.g., lifestyle tips) to capture clicks, but rely more heavily on clickbait because it does not decrease space available for political propaganda. Government propagandists use clickbait at a rate commensurate with commercial and celebrity social media accounts. Clickbait is associated with more views and likes, and greater reach of government propaganda outlets and messages. These results reveal how the advertising-based business model and affordances of social media influence political propaganda and how government strategies to control information are moving beyond censorship, propaganda, and disinformation
Replication Data for: CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media
No full textProtest event analysis is an important method for the study of collective action and social movements and typically draws on traditional media reports as the data source. We introduce collective action from social media (CASM)—a system that uses convolutional neural networks on image data and recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory on text data in a two-stage classifier to identify social media posts about offline collective action. We implement CASM on Chinese social media data and identify more than 100,000 collective action events from 2010 to 2017 (CASM-China). We evaluate the performance of CASM through cross-validation, out-of-sample validation, and comparisons with other protest data sets. We assess the effect of online censorship and find it does not substantially limit our identification of events. Compared to other protest data sets, CASM-China identifies relatively more rural, land-related protests and relatively few collective action events related to ethnic and religious conflict
Replication Data for: CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media
No full textProtest event analysis is an important method for the study of collective action and social movements and typically draws on traditional media reports as the data source. We introduce collective action from social media (CASM)—a system that uses convolutional neural networks on image data and recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory on text data in a two-stage classifier to identify social media posts about offline collective action. We implement CASM on Chinese social media data and identify more than 100,000 collective action events from 2010 to 2017 (CASM-China). We evaluate the performance of CASM through cross-validation, out-of-sample validation, and comparisons with other protest data sets. We assess the effect of online censorship and find it does not substantially limit our identification of events. Compared to other protest data sets, CASM-China identifies relatively more rural, land-related protests and relatively few collective action events related to ethnic and religious conflict
Replication Data for: Concealing Corruption: How Chinese Officials Distort Upward Reporting of Online Grievances
No full textA prerequisite for the durability of authoritarian regimes as well as their effective governance is the regime's ability to gather reliable information about the actions of lower-tier officials. Allowing public participation in the form of online complaints is one approach authoritarian regimes have taken to improve monitoring of lower-tier officials.
In this paper, we gain rare access to internal communications between a monitoring agency and upper-level officials in China. We show that citizen grievances posted publicly online that contain complaints of corruption are systematically concealed from upper-level authorities when they implicate lower-tier officials or associates connected to lower-tier officials through patronage ties. Information manipulation occurs primarily through omission of wrongdoing rather than censorship or falsification, suggesting that even in the digital age, in a highly determined and capable regime where reports of corruption are actively and publicly voiced, monitoring the behavior of regime agents remains a challenge
Reporting After Removal: The Effects of Journalist Expulsion on Foreign News Coverage
No full textReplication data for "Reporting After Removal: The Effects of Journalist Expulsion on Foreign News Coverage". What happens to international media reporting when governments expel foreign journalists? Countries around the world expel foreign reporters, yet there is no consensus about the effects of such expulsions. We argue there are three possible outcomes of expulsion: a chilling effect, resilience, and backlash. Using China as a case study, we evaluate these competing theories by collecting a novel dataset of foreign news stories about China and applying time-series causal inference methods to measure the effects of expulsion on information origination, composition, and reach after March 2020, when the Chinese government expelled a large number of foreign correspondents. Results shows that expelled media organizations did not experience a chilling effect or backlash on reporting and may have changed their production processes to account for expulsion. These findings suggest that news organizations can remain resilient to the impact of extraordinary events which target the organization and disrupt internal production processes
Replication Data for: Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China
No full textA growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes are responsive to societal actors, but our understanding of the sources of authoritarian responsiveness remains limited because of the challenges of measurement and causal identification. By conducting an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties, we examine factors that affect officials' incentives to respond to citizens in an authoritarian context. At baseline, we find that approximately one third of county governments respond to citizen demands expressed online. Threats of collective action and threats of tattling to upper levels of government cause county governments to be considerably more responsive, while identifying as loyal, long-standing members of the Chinese Communist Party does not increase responsiveness. Moreover, we find that threats of collective action make local officials to be more publicly responsive. Together these results demonstrate that top-down mechanisms of oversight as well as bottom-up societal pressures are possible sources of authoritarian responsiveness
- …
