Study shows government snooping is scaring people away from reading about terrorist groups
Apr28
on April 28, 2016
at 4:26 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Chilling Effect, edward snowden, Jonathon Penney, Mass surveillance, Wikipedia
If you’re in doubt about whether the US government’s various programs to spy on its citizens has made people more paranoid, this should clear things up. Jonathon Penney, a fellow at the University of Toronto’s interdisciplinary Citizen Lab, analyzed traffic on Wikipedia and found that visits to entries about terrorist groups fell by 30 percent after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was spying on citizens’ online activity. In his paper, ‘Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use‘, Penney looked at monthly views on Wikipedia pages for 48 topics that the US Department of Homeland Security said it tracks…
This story continues at The Next Web