To what extent are Internet users resilient to online censorship? When does censorship
influence consumption of information and when does it create backlash? Drawing on a …

This article provides a review of recent literature in economics on the effect of mass media
on politics. The focus is on the welfare effects of mass media. I also discuss the likely …

As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for
controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be …

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political
issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion …

Working under a model of privacy in which data remain private even from the statistician, we
study the tradeoff between privacy guarantees and the risk of the resulting statistical …

This chapter discusses how digital nationalism works in China. It makes the case that
nationalism in digital spheres develops unique dynamics, and that we should view those …

In 1999, as a freshman at Peking University, I lived on the Changping campus together with
about eight hundred other social sciences and humanities majors. The campus, located on …

Following a burgeoning literature on private actors under digital authoritarianism, this study
aims to understand the role played by social media users in sustaining authoritarian rule. It …

The advent of online media, and particularly social media, has led to scholarly debates
about their implications. Authoritarian countries are interesting in this respect because social …

Chinese social media and big data represent an important share of the global Internet, but
have received relatively less attention. This editorial examines three dominant discourses …