Longitudinal Network Centrality Using Incomplete Data

Steinert-Threlkeld, Zachary C.

doi:10.1017/pan.2017.6

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Because Twitter returns following lists in reverse chronological order, we can infer when an account started following another account (Steinert-Threlkeld, 2017). For the accounts in the six categories, we compare the increase in followers from mainland China to the increase in followers from Hong Kong accounts relative to their December 2019 baselines.…”

Section: What Types Of Twitter Accounts Did Mainland Twitter Users Start To Follow As a Results Of The Crisis?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis is a Gateway to Censored Information: The Case of Coronavirus in China

Steinert-Threlkeld

Hobbs

Chang

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Crisis and anxiety motivate people to track news closely. We examine the consequences of this increased motivation in authoritarian regimes that normally exert significant control over access to media. Using the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, we show that crisis spurs censorship circumvention to access international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals have circumvented censorship, they not only receive more information about the crisis itself, but the crisis becomes a gateway to unrelated information that the regime has long censored. Through this mechanism, crisis both increases attention to information relevant to individuals' current circumstances and incidentally increases access to information that the regime considers sensitive.in Thailand. As of August 2020, COVID-19 has infected over 91,000 people in China with over 4,500 deaths, and over 17 million people worldwide with over 650,000 deaths. 2 While initial reports of COVID-19 were delayed by officials in Wuhan, 3 Chinese officials took quick steps to contain the virus after it was officially identified and the first deaths reported. On January 23, 2020, the entire city was placed under quarantine -the government disallowed transportation to and from the city and placed residents of the city on lockdown. 4 The next day, similar restrictions were placed on 9 other cities in Hubei province. 5 While Hubei province and Wuhan were most affected by the outbreak, cities all over China were subject to similar lockdowns. By mid-February, about half of China -780 million people -were living under some sort of travel restrictions. 6 Between January 10 and February 29, 2020, 2,169 people in Wuhan died of the virus. 7 The Effect of Crisis on Information Seeking and Censorship CircumventionWe use digital trace data to understand the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on information seeking. Table 1 summarizes the empirical tests we conduct in this paper. In the first subsection, we show that the crisis increased the popularity of virtual private network (VPN) applications, which are necessary to jump the Great Firewall, downloaded on iPhones in China. We also show that the crisis expanded the number of Twitter users in China, which has been blocked by the Great Firewall since 2009. The crisis further increased the number of page views of Chinese language Wikipedia, which has been blocked by the Great Firewall since 2015. The second subsection shows that the areas more affected by the crisis -such as Wuhan and Hubei Province -were more likely to see increases of circumvention.The third subsection shows that the increase in circumvention caused by the crisis also expanded

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Section: What Types Of Twitter Accounts Did Mainland Twitter Users Start To Follow As a Results Of The Crisis?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis is a Gateway to Censored Information: The Case of Coronavirus in China

Steinert-Threlkeld

Hobbs

Chang

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Instead of collecting data on more protests, an alternative is to collect data about social networks before and during a protest. [ 14 ] uses ties within a social movement to estimate the probability that individuals cease participation; [ 12 ] shows protest information has differential effects depending on the degree centrality of its source, and [ 87 ] shows how to measure daily changes in online network structure; and [ 30 ] uses school attendance records to show how local network participation affects individuals’ decision to protest. With more detailed data on a society’s underlying network, the extent to which networks condition repression’s effect may become clearer.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How social networks affect the repression-dissent puzzle

Steinert‐Threlkeld

Steinert-Threlkeld

2021

PLoS ONE

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Scholars have offered multiple theoretical resolutions to explain inconsistent findings about the relationship of state repression and protests, but this repression-dissent puzzle remains unsolved. We simulate the spread of protest on social networks to suggest that the repression-dissent puzzle arises from the nature of statistical sampling. Even though the paper’s simulations construct repression so it can only decrease protest size, the strength of repression sometimes correlates with a decrease, increase, or no change in protest size, regardless of the type of network or sample size chosen. Moreover, the results are most contradictory when the repression rate most closely matches that observed in real-world data. These results offer a new framework for understanding state and protester behavior and suggest the importance of collecting network data when studying protests.

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“…We downloaded the profile information of all accounts that began following these popular accounts after 1 November 2019. Because Twitter returns follower lists in reverse chronological order, we can infer when an account started following another account ( 46 ). We then use the location field to identify which of these 38,050,454 followers are from mainland China or Hong Kong (see SI Appendix , section 2 for more details).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because Twitter returns follower lists in reverse chronological order, we can infer when an account started following another account ( 46 ). For the accounts in the six categories, we compare the increase in followers from mainland China to the increase in followers from Hong Kong accounts relative to their December 2019 baselines; we chose Hong Kong because it is part of the People’s Republic of China but is not affected by the Firewall.…”

Section: The Effect Of Crisis On Information Seeking and Censorship Circumventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive topics in China

Chang

Hobbs

Roberts

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert significant control over access to media. The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored. Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.

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Longitudinal Network Centrality Using Incomplete Data

Cited by 11 publications

References 66 publications

Crisis is a Gateway to Censored Information: The Case of Coronavirus in China

Crisis is a Gateway to Censored Information: The Case of Coronavirus in China

How social networks affect the repression-dissent puzzle

COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive topics in China

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