Public perceptions of television influence and opinions about censorship in Singapore

It is a common assumption that in many countries mass media censorship is imposed by an authoritarian government on an unwilling public. This study examines public opinion about television censorship in the island nation of Singapore. More specifically, we tested the third-person effect hypothesis, which suggests that people expect media content to have more negative influence on others than on themselves, and that some support for censorship is based on that perceptual bias. Data for the study came from face-to-face interviews with 506 randomly selected Singaporeans who evaluated ten categories of 'sensitive' television content. Results revealed (1) a substantial perceptual bias in all content categories; (2) generally strong opinion favoring censorship of television content; and (3) a significant relationship between these two factors, suggesting that people may support censorship of media in part because of a tendency to overestimate its negative influence.