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When Chinese students were given the uncensored internet
- alanwong 7y agoOP and an editor of the news site (Inkstone) that published the article. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. It's getting late over here but we can answer your questions tomorrow. For those of you interested, here's a link to the published research: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765 (full text requires a subscription.) And here's a draft of the research (PDF): http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fall/1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fal...
- lawlessone 7y agoHow did they get permission give the students uncensored access?
- yorwba 7y agoThe acknowledge a grant by the National Science Foundation of China, so I assume they convinced someone there that knowing more about the effects of censorship would be useful for the government as well.
- qinchencq 7y agoThe researchers made clear that they are "independent of the government." They also assured participants that "we will erase all survey data if we are faced with political pressure to share the data with government or school officials." They used email and WeChat (similar to WhatsApp) messages to communicate with the students and even hand out free one-year account of Youku (similar to Youtube) to obscure the study's explicit focus on censorship.
- yorwba 7y agoThat doesn't mean they didn't get approval to do so. Obscuring the focus on censorship is just good study design, since they wanted to find out whether explicitly pointing out that foreign media report differently has an effect. I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with anything.
- yorwba 7y agoI just spent way too long figuring out the NSFC grant system, but I did eventually find the grant acknowledged in the paper. [1] Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he could have done the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards. [1] can't link, but you can find it with 批准号 71425006 and 批准年度 2014 at https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-list https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-li...
- qinchencq 7y agoHi, reporter of the story here. From their paper, it looks like they didn't. "We intentionally keep the language introducing the tool [VPNs] vague to avoid political pressure from the school administration."
- baybal2 7y agoI've been seeing a great lot of military movement across the Guangdong province in last few days. Any info on that? Just today, saw a column of 20 bridge layers and an escort of comparable size on the rail near Changping
- carapace 7y ago(With JS disabled the site is useless. T_T )
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoHow does this compare to students that grew up with an uncensored internet? I.e. how often do they access materials that the party would censor?
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoProbably extremely frequently since the GFW blocks a huge number of random things including even GitHub once in a while.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoClearly the party was censoring GitHub because of a couple particular repos, it would just muddy the picture if you said that github counts. Not to mention that most of the people in my family and most of my close friends don't visit github.
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoGood point - I certainly uses GitHub all the time and I should thank you for pointing out my bias. Most of the people probably won't care, but then again, aside from Google, most people here probably won't care about the censored websites either. It's also worth mentioning that Google's Chinese search is atrocious although that might have happened after they quit China.
- Leary 7y agoThe study in question: https://site.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8706/f/3586-1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf https://site.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8706/f/3586-19... A quote: "An important — although need not be exclusive — reason why students exhibit low demand for uncensored information and hence are unwillingness to pay for access is their beliefs that such information is not valuable. Specifically, a key dimension of such belief is students’ assessment of the difference in value between foreign and domestic news outlets, and whether the value-added of foreign outlets justifies the cost to access."
- hohohmm 7y agoThere are many ways to criticize the draconian Chinese censorship, but implying western media as the benefit of uncensored internet and objective and healthy source of information is just laughable. Particularly funny is this piece: "Chen and Yang found that students who were consistently exposed to uncensored foreign media outlets became more informed of events that are usually unreported in Chinese media, such as President Donald Trump’s businesses in China and surveillance in Xinjiang." You might as well say that encouraged exposure to Chinese media outlets help people become more informed of events that are usually unreported in Western media... Next time when you do something like this, use the the abundance of extremely well-done and educational videos on Youtube that beat the crap out of your regular western media in both objectivity and healthiness, and might just save the monetary rewards entirely.
- lawlessone 7y ago>use the the abundance of extremely well-done and educational videos on Youtube that beat the crap out of your regular western media in both objectivity and healthiness Any recommendations?
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoEdX and MIT OCW are both based on YouTube - I think they have mirrors or at least unofficial uploads in China but it would be better to just use YouTube. Aside from that, there are a vast amount of video lectures uploaded by university professors that are probably not accessible from mainland China. I spent the majority of my undergrad YouTube time on MVs, so there's that.
- comicjk 7y agoThe YouTube recommendation algorithm will rapidly bubble you into a parody of your original beliefs. Of course this feels true and reliable and complete, but it's a false sense. It's a good way to learn what you want to learn, but a terrible way to learn what you don't want to learn. A general media source, for all its errors, has the huge advantage of giving you information you didn't ask for.
- dougmwne 7y agoSo half of the students were randomly given a free VPN connection. They were informed that their browsing activities through the VPN would be monitored for the study. This seems a poor study to draw conclusions about the demand for uncensored information. The censorship regime must have a hugely chilling effect. No-one wants to get sent to a re-education camp or have their social credit score crater. Why would a rational person run the risk of those consequences? And if they were to learn the extent of their government's manipulation of their reality, what are they supposed to do with that information? The study says there were low rates of the participant's roommate learning censored information. If I'd been peeking at information I knew could harm my career and freedom, why on earth would I tell people about it? To me, what this study is really saying is that internet censorship is not just a technological process, it's also a social process.
- theseadroid 7y agoIt is more than a social process. One day I'll translate this article into English: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E5%B9%B4%E5%B8%9D%E5%90%A7%E5%87%BA%E5%BE%81%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E5%B9%B4%E5%B8%9D%E5%90%A... The gist of it is in 2016 January, many mainland Chinese VPNed onto Facebook to post curses on Taiwan politicians who support Taiwan independence. It's not a big event but it's funny they VPNed out to do that. Also from my personal experience many oversea Chinese students, and first generation immigrants, many of whom tech workers, among which many of them working for FANNG, dont consider censorship a big deal.
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoA couple thoughts - assuming you are American: 1) The Facebook campaign is: a) cowardly on the government's part - why don't they just open up the GFW for a month and see what happens? b) somewhat expected even if done by real people out of their own initiative - what do you expect if Long Island decided to go independent? Obviously not equivalent but hopefully you get the idea. c) Censorship is a big deal to some or most of my best friends - but if it is, would they trust you enough to talk about it, especially given that it is a big deal, they still have family and friends at home, and the government has gone to some length to strengthen it? To be clear I appreciate your comment and yes, that article is an interesting historical event that is worthy of an article on Wikipedia.
- bjourne 7y agoI wonder how often Western people browse for information that is considered taboo in their countries. My guess is not very often.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoHow taboo? Basically everyone watches porn which is mildly taboo. I'm sure there's some people that listen to far right podcasts (which is taboo local to this crowd) but they won't tell obviously.
- bjourne 7y agoHow to funnel money to terrorist groups. Or maybe browsing Hamas' official sites. Would you dare it?
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoI know a couple people who are big into geopolitics and they literally read "terrorist" news sites. They read a fuckton of news in general. I'm sure they're on lists.
- darkpuma 7y agoI've got some Hezbollah propaganda mp3's laying around here somewhere. Does that count?
- simonh 7y agoSo the equivalent of Wikipedia for a Chinese person is what, for a Westerner? Snuff movies?
- CandidoRondon 7y agoPerhaps something like Daily Stormer or Unz.com i.e. racist, anti-feminist, or Holocaust denial material.
- 7y ago
- nootropicat 7y agoLooking up what you want in an uncensored but monitored channel is such a great idea, what could go wrong? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoThrowaway because my real account can be easily linked to my real name. Being a Chinese living in the US, thoughts: 1) Kudos for doing this experiment - one of the authors works at Peking University and I imagine there must have been at least some pushback for him. I hope this indicates a greater trend where academics gets free passes from censorship but maybe not. That being said... 2) Maybe things have changed but a few years ago the GFW wasn't really a hinderance for me browsing YouTube or Wikipedia or anything. If asked in a survey "have you ever tried to get past the GFW" of course I would have answered no. Of course I am a computer person, but I wonder how valid the findings are given my anecdotal evidence. 3) There are fake news everywhere, both on pro and on anti Chinese government news sources. One thing I have observed is that in China at least among the educated population there's a lower level of trust in pro government news when compared to the trust level in anti Chinese government news in the US educated population (assuming HN is a somewhat representative subset of said population). 4) Chinese media quality is low at least IMHO. Gossips always win over important news, international news are not shown prominently. I would rather read NYT or WSJ or WaPo. 5) Side comment, a lot of the comments on HN are anti Chinese government and sometimes anti Chinese. I don't care about the former, but Chinese people are people and anti Chinese is not cool.
- codezero 7y agoThanks for your comment, it's super informative! 3) I think (I have no data! :() that HN has a larger majority of Chinese and Indian users than American ones at this point, I base this on what appears to be a larger investment in technical education by those two countries in the past few decades, and the attraction of those folks to the SV tech scene. I could be way off, but would love to see coarse geo-IP data from HN visitors :) 5) Agreed. I am all for being critical of governments behaving badly, not just China's, and it's a bummer when folks couple people to their governments. It's a sure-fire way to make those people support their governments.
- throwaway_9cc8 7y agoThank you, that means a lot! Alexa and SimilarWeb both agreed US is still by a large margin where the most traffic come from, with India being in the top five. Can't attest to the accuracy but at least it's data. Consider the fact that English is a (required in school but still) foreign language in China, it's probably not super popular (back) there, although I could be (happily) incorrect.
- sagebird 7y agoRe: Even when given free tools to access anything they wanted, less than 5% of the subjects actually accessed uncensored content. I am not particularly concerned by a low interest in general( if we ignore the other flaws and accept this study for arguments sake). In “free” societies not that many people are engaged in politics, activism, etc. If two percent of a population is paying attention and hollers when something gross happens, and then 30% of the population joins in, maybe that’s enough.
- gwbas1c 7y agoLook at the US, we have uncensored internet and people still believe all kinds of fake news. Major media outlets have major biases, and people still believe the biases. (Both US liberal and conservative news has major bias.) As much as I believe in a free and uncensored internet, access to it isn't a panacea for fixing problems with a government.