Silence on Xinjiang: Freedom of Expression on Chinese Social Media

This research investigates whether Chinese netizens possess the freedom to express political opinions, particularly opin­ions that disagree with the Chinese state media narrative on controversial news, due to the cybersecurity policies in place since President Xi Jinping came into power in 2012. Previ­ous literature notes how countries, with either democratic or authoritarian government models, have used fears of fake news to silence political commentary opposing the gov­ernment-curated view. Literature also observes the rise of self-censorship among netizens in response to government threats of punishment for violating censorship regulations. To discover the state of the global media narrative and the Chinese state media narrative, this research found patterns in topics and framing of articles from Chinese state-support­ed news agencies and independent global news agencies to represent each narrative. Using these narrative frames, this research thematically coded hundreds of social media posts from the Chinese social media site Weibo and the global social media site Twitter posted between 2012 and 2022 to determine which posts align with which narrative and if politics could be discussed freely on Chinese social media in comparison to global social media. This research project predicted netizens on Chinese social media would self-cen­sor political opinions opposing the Chinese state media narrative to avoid punishment. However, the overwhelm­ing lack of political discussion on Weibo made the reason behind the lack of data, either censorship or self-censorship, difficult to determine. Analyzing why netizens on Chinese social media cannot or do not discuss controversial politi­cal topics on Weibo can aid in the creation of new policies meant to reduce censorship in China and increase freedom of expression.