Estimating the Cost of Internet Censorship in China: Evidence from a Gamified Remote Platform

Abstract

We exploit internet censorship intensity changes due to political events to study the impact of internet censorship on online laboor work in China. With a unique dataset from the Ingress (video game) community platform, a difference-in-differences design shows that an increase in China’s internet censorship intensity during politically sensitive dates, while not affecting the amount of volunteer working time, reduces online labour work efficiency by eight percent for volunteers from mainland China relative to those elsewhere. This efficiency loss due to internet censorship can be a proxy for the labour productivity loss for Chinese oversea e-commercers, freelancers and other related online workers.