In “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Oxford researcher Jonathon Penny studied Wikipedia traffic patterns before and after the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden about the U.S. National Security Agency’s internet spying tactics, finding a 20 percent decline in terrorism-related article views involving terms like al-Qaeda, Taliban, and car bomb. The implication is that when people realized they were being watched by their governments, some of them stopped reading articles that they thought could get them into trouble. The name for this concept is chilling effect.
