Oddbean

This is old news, but our new audience doesn't know it. Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 117, 2016 Quote of Glenn Greenwald, from the Intercept April 28 2016: "The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of which 87 percent of Americans were aware), there was “a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned ‘al Qaeda,’ ‘car bomb’ or ‘Taliban.'” People were afraid to read articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well by Penney: “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate.” Now of course, the link ironically has Cloudflare/Google, but hey, I gotta link original source: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/ & https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645