The Impact of Media Censorship:Evidence from a Field Experiment in China
Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China tomeasure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored Internet. We track subjects’ me-dia consumption, beliefs regarding the media, economic beliefs, political attitudes, and behaviors over 18months. We find four main results:(i)free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sen-sitive information;(ii)temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicatingthat demand is not permanently low;(iii)acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes toknowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and(iv)social transmission of information is statis-tically significant but small in magnitude. We calibrate a simple model to show that the combination oflow demand for uncensored information and the moderate social transmission means China’s censorshipapparatus may remain robust to a large number of citizens receiving access to an uncensored Internet.
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