مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد منجر شدن دیواره آتش بزرگ به خود سانسوری – امرالد 2017

The proliferation of the Internet brings tremendous impact on the society, and simultaneously shows its power in unmasking the illness of the society and challenging the authority of political regimes (Schwartz, 2005). The regulation on the Internet could be seen all around the world ( Thomas et al., 1998) and China is a typical example to pierce the governance on the Internet and how people react to the regulation. The Chinese Internet market has expanded rapidly over the past decade and the Internet penetration rate in China has reached 53.2% by the end of 2016 (CNNIC, 2017). Research questions about how Chinese people use the Internet for political or civil purposes and how Chinese government regulates the Internet have garnered enormous attention internationally (e.g., King et al., 2013; King et al., 2014; Roberts, 2015; Kou et al., 2017). The Great Fire Wall (GFW thereafter) is a well-known Internet regulation system which endorses stringent governance to filter sensitive or untrue contents and block access to Western websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google. Prior studies have made great efforts to explore what kind of content are likely to be censored (e.g., Hughes and Wacker, 2003; King et al., 2013; King et al., 2014), how the filtering system works in different place and by different censors (e.g., Dong, 2012; Lacharite, 2002), how censorship is conducted on social media (e.g., Bamman et al., 2012; MacKinnon, 2009). With most of the previous research mainly focusing on the mechanism or the technical infrastructure of Internet regulation, only a few studies have explored how Chinese netizens cope with the censorship system (e.g., Mulvenon, and Chase, 2005; Guo and Feng, 2011; Yang and Liu, 2014; Roberts, 2015), and even few of them addressed the impact of Internet censorship on the public with a causation relationship. This study aims to examine the influence of Internet censorship on Chinese users’ tendency of self-censorship through a controlled experiment.