A new study from Oxford University reveals empirical evidence that knowledge of government mass surveillance programs make the public less likely to read articles about surveillance and other related topics online, Motherboard reports. The study analyzed Wikipedia traffic before and after the June 2013 Snowden revelations and found evidence of “chilling effects.” Traffic on “privacy-sensitive” articles went down after the “exogenous shock” from the initial Snowden coverage. The articles chosen in the study were based on keywords that are flagged by the Department of Homeland Security for “suspicious” activity. “It means that the NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations … are associated in the findings not only with a sudden chilling effect, but also a longer term, possibly even permanent, decrease in Web traffic to the Wikipedia pages studied,” said the study’s author, Jon Penney.
Full Story