selective deletion of information. For example, in China selective deletion of online con-
tent is widespread.
King et al. (2013) try to understand what types of online content is
likely to be censored in modern China by making snapshots of the Chinese blogosphere
every 20 min and identifying the content that gets deleted ex post. They find that Chinese
censors were more likely to delete appeals for coordination and any form of collective
action than the criticism of the Communist Party and the incumbent regime. In a related
study,
King et al. (2014) performed a field experiment to confirm this finding. Using ran-
domized blog postings in Chinese online social media, they find that coordination mes-
sages indeed had a higher probability of being censored, ...