When do people care about censorship?
While discussing historical patterns in censorship of the Internet with my colleague Danny O’Brien, we started looking at the Google trend data for censorship-related searches. What we found was a striking seasonal pattern in searches for the word “censorship” compared to other related terms:
censorship 
filtering 
censored 
What on earth was going on? Why is censorship discussed so much more at some times of year than others? We kicked around various theories, tried various control searches, and wondered why censorship is less of an issue during (northern) summer. Finally, Danny came up with a persuasive explanation: the pattern is driven by students in the northern hemisphere doing research for class essays. That explains the strong drops during the long summer holidays and the briefer Christmas break. The theory is supported by a comparison to another typical assignment topic:
censorship filtering censored 
capital punishment