No. 115/2023

30 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 115/2023 CLOSE UP ON RESEARCH war in Ukraine. In Iran, the regime throttles the Internet in the hope of preventing protesters from connecting and preventing information from getting out. But censorship, according to Roberts, is more than that. Particularly in peacetime, censorship is often far more subtle. “Certain kinds of information become harder to access without people necessarily noticing,” she explains. “They have to make much more of an effort to get at the information, but many people don’t make the effort because it’s often just not practical in everyday life.” Take local protests in China, for example: “Let’s assume a person has heard about a protest but can’t find anything about it online because all the posts on the topic have been tacitly removed,” Roberts explains. “This person will ask themselves: Are there any protests happening at all? Or perhaps they will think: It can’t be that important, after all.” PROTESTS REMAIN HIDDEN In this situation, people need to have observed the protests themselves or heard about them from others if they are to find out about them in the first place. And in order to access blocked foreign media and their reporting, you need technical solutions like virtual private network (VPN) connections to bypass the censor. But that costs money and involves a good deal of effort, so not everyone will go the extra mile. Consequently, says Roberts, networking directed against the government and the narrative it pursues is forestalled or at least made more difficult. Roberts is now a professor at the University of California in San Diego where she teaches and conducts research. In 2022, she received the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, which is granted jointly by the Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society. The selection committee was convinced by Roberts’ unusual career and innovative research profile. She wants to use the award amount of 1.5 million euros to extend her research on censorship and launch a project on the role of social media platforms together with the Technical University of Munich and the University of Konstanz. Asked about her career path, Molly Roberts says she was very lucky – simply because she had the opportunity to freely pursue her ideas and interests. “It was just on a whim that I signed up for Chinese language classes when I was a student.” She had never even been to Asia when she started university. “I was just curious and wanted to try something new.” Again, it was a mentor who nudged her in the right direction. “She recommended me to take an extra course in sociology that dealt with China under Mao.” After the course, Roberts was so fascinated that, in 2005, she spontaneously applied to a programme enabling her to spend the summer in China. It would be the first of many visits there and she spent one semester studying in Beijing. “One of the things that has always fascinated me about China is the speed of economic development,” says Roberts. “Every time you go there, everything looks completely different because so much has happened.” INFORMATION BECOMES HARDER TO ACCESS WITHOUT PEOPLE NOTICING. “