Internet Censorship: Chen And Yang

In this section, Chen and Yang describe their experimental treatments and discuss how they measure and translate the outcomes. In the experiment, all participants are students from a top university and an average university in Beijing. Among these participants, Chen and Yang let students who have already regularly use tools to bypass censorship be benchmark to interpret the treatment effects. They randomly assign the rest students to either a control condition in which they are subject to censorship or an access treatment in which they receive free access to uncensored internet. Chen and Yang also randomly assign some students in both control and treatment groups to a two-phase encourage treatment to encourage them to visit foreign news websites …show more content…
Chen and Yang claim that they randomly provide 100 students free one-year VIP-account of online video streaming services to hide the purpose of the experiment. However, I do not think this placebo works very well as Chen and Yang have already revealed their purpose by encouraging some students to browse blocked websites. In addition, Chen and Yang point out that they do not have browsing data on censored websites for existing users and students who do not active the tool as well as browsing data on unblocked websites for all users. To address these limitations, Chen and Yang ask students to fulfill surveys related to their online activities, such as the frequency of browsing foreign websites and rank the importance of various domestic and foreign media news sources. However, I think Chen and Yang needs to make it more clear on the relationship between the frequency of browsing foreign websites and the rank of news sources. For example, they can use existing browsing data to determine how rank of news sources relates to the frequency of browsing foreign websites and then use the survey information to construct a more precise time students spend on browsing foreign