Tor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online anonymity-granting technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do people use anonymity-granting technologies when surfing the Internet? Anecdotal evidence suggests that people often resort to using online anonymity services, like the Tor network, because they are concerned about the possibility of their government infringing their civil and political rights, especially in highly repressive regimes. This claim has yet to be subject to rigorous cross-national, over time testing. In this article, econometric analysis of newly compiled data on Tor network usage from 2011 to 2013 shows that the relationship between political repression and the use of the Tor network is U-shaped. Political repression drives usage of Tor the most in both highly repressive and highly liberal contexts. The shape of this relationship plausibly emerges as a function of people’s opportunity to use Tor and their need to use anonymity-granting technologies to express their basic political rights in highly repressive regimes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".