Why censoring social media might mean more-violent protests

Cutting off access to social media during times of civil unrest might actually lead to more violence than no censorship at all.

This is according to two European researchers who built a computer model showing that high levels of censorship (e.g., Hosni Mubarak’s decision to turn off Egypt’s Internet) result in sustained periods of violent activity, whereas no censorship leads to spiky periods of violent outbursts broken up by relatively long periods of relative calm. The authors, Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro, detail their findings in a paper titled “Social Media Censorship in Times of Political Unrest – A Social Simulation Experiment with the UK Riots,” which appears in the July issue of the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology.