Concentration and self-censorship in commercial media

Concentration and Self-Censorship in Commercial Media

Within a simple model of non-localized, Hotelling-type competition among arbitrary numbers of media outlets we characterize quality and content of media under different ownership structures. Assuming advertising-sponsored, profit-maximizing outlets, we show that (i) topics sensitive to advertisers can be underreported (self-censored) by all outlets in the market, (ii) self-censorship increases ...

Censorship and Two Types of Self-Censorship∗†

We propose and defend a distinction between two types of self-censorship: public and private. In public self-censorship, individuals restrain their expressive attitudes in response to public censors. In private self-censorship, individuals do so in the absence of public censorship. We argue for this distinction by introducing a general model which allows us to identify, describe, and compare a ...

A Theory of Broadcast Media Concentration and Commercial Advertising

Self-Censorship on Facebook

We report results from an exploratory analysis examining “last-minute” self-censorship, or content that is filtered after being written, on Facebook. We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last...

The Decline of Social Media Censorship and the Rise of Self-Censorship after the 2016 Failed Turkish Coup

In this work, we examine the effect of the 2016 Turkish coup on social media censorship, both by the government ordering Twitter to conduct censorship and as well by people removing their own tweets. We compared 5.5M tweets collected from Turkey pre-coup to 8.5M tweets collected post-coup. Although self-censorship of the press is not a novel practice following past military coups in Turkey, in ...