COVID-19 and Internet Self-censorship in China

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_160How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Online discourse; Communicative rationality; Self-censorship; Weibo; Zhihu; COVID policy

Abstract

Existing studies of online discourse in China had primarily focused on the government’s control and censorship of online content and their sociological implications, and not enough emphasis had been placed on self-censorship, especially when it pertains to the individuals’ interaction with the knowledge of censorship’s existence. This study examines snapshots of two major platforms of online discourse in China: Weibo, a Twitter-like social media app, and Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform’s interaction with self-censorship surrounding discourse on Shanghai’s Omicron outbreak. A survey and interviews are conducted on recurring users’ experiences with self-censorship on the platforms. Individual instances of self-censorship and the lack thereof are analyzed through the lenses of Foucault’s concept of “power” and Habermas’ communicative rationality. The paper concludes that Weibo, as a social media platform, suffers two layers of censorship: one from the government, and the other from the users of the platforms themselves who restrict their own speech out of fear of censorship. Moreover, Zhihu, while not completely devoid of censorship, had demonstrated on multiple occasions that it is capable of supporting discourse in a degree of vitality uncommon in authoritarian China.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alan Zunhan Yuan
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/29
TI  - COVID-19 and Internet Self-censorship in China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 6th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1354
EP  - 1361
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_160
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_160
ID  - Yuan2022
ER  -