Quintin Beazer, Ph.D., and Holger Kern, Ph.D., Associate Professors of Political Science at Florida State University, co-authored an article in the British Journal of Political Science titled “When Do Private Actors Engage in Censorship? Evidence From a Correspondence Experiment with Russian Private Media Firms.” Below is a summary of the article written by doctoral candidate Martin Gandur (Ph.D. Political Science ‘ 25).
In “When Do Private Actors Engage in Censorship? Evidence From a Correspondence Experiment with Russian Private Media Firms,” Quintin Beazer, Ph.D., Holger Kern, Ph.D., and co-authors investigate the censorship behavior of private media firms.

The article, published in the British Journal of Political Science, was co-authored alongside Charles Crabtree, Ph.D., of Dartmouth College, and Christopher J. Farris, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan.
Using a correspondence experiment with Russian private media firms, the authors find that Russian private media firms censor advertisements with calls for political collective action or anti-regime messages. Furthermore, they find that these media firms also censor advertisements containing calls for non-political collective action.
The authors’ study offers the first systematic evidence of regime-induced private censorship in an authoritarian regime. While prior studies have examined the types of content that authoritarian regimes censor, the authors’ research focuses on the censorship behavior of private media firms.
The authors’ research differs from previous literature on autocratic information control, which mostly studies censorship that is either directly implemented by state and party institutions or carried out by private companies under the direct supervision of the regime. In contrast, the authors’ work studies the censorship decisions that private media firms make in a context where the boundaries between permitted and politically perilous speech are ambiguous, which they refer to as regime-induced private censorship. Moreover, the authors test two competing theories about what information autocrats want to censor. While some argue that authoritarian regimes want to censor calls for collective action, regardless of their political content, others suggest that autocrats seek to censor any anti-regime messages, regardless of their collective action component.
The authors use a correspondence experiment to investigate the extent and targets of regime-induced private censorship among private media firms in Russia. Using a fictitious Russian nongovernmental organization (NGO), the authors contacted media firms with a request to place an online advertisement on their website. The advertisements vary in their political content (non-political or anti-regime) and their call for collective action.
The authors’ article suggests that future research should study cross-national differences in censorship strategies and targets of censorship. Moreover, they hope that the typology of censorship proposed in their article will be helpful to other scholars studying authoritarian regimes’ strategies of information control.
To read the full article, click here. To learn more about FSU’s Department of Political Science, visit coss.fsu.edu/polisci.
APA Citation:
Beazer, Q., Crabtree, C., Fariss, C., & Kern, H. (2022). 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. doi:10.1017/S0007123421000351