In an authoritarian state, the censor isn't always the government. Sometimes it's the private business that decides your message is too risky to run.
We usually picture authoritarian censorship as a state act. But repression also leans on private actors — firms that, fearing the regime, censor not only themselves but the people who come to them. The authors call this regime-induced private censorship, and ask whether it can be caught in the act.
The study ran a correspondence experiment in Russia: posing as would-be advertisers, the researchers approached private media firms with ad requests whose content was randomly varied — some neutral, some carrying anti-regime language or calls for collective action — and recorded which the firms were willing to run.
Private media firms censored third-party advertisements that included anti-regime language, calls for political or non-political collective action, or both. No official had to intervene — the firms anticipated the regime's wishes and enforced them on their own customers.
Focusing only on state censorship understates how information is actually controlled. When repression makes private firms into gatekeepers, control becomes diffuse, deniable, and self-enforcing — a quieter machinery than the censor's stamp, and in some ways a more durable one.
Beazer, Quintin H., Charles D. Crabtree, Christopher J. Fariss, and Holger L. Kern. “When Do Private Actors Engage in Censorship? Evidence from a Correspondence Experiment with Russian Private Media Firms.” British Journal of Political Science 52(4): 1790–1809, 2022.
read the paper →a correspondence experiment with private media firms in russia · the examples illustrate the experimental contrasts and documented direction; estimates live in the paper