According to Healey (2004), excessively supervising public voices could be the breeding-ground of political domination and in an utter liberal society there will be no space to develop censorship. Moreover, as one of the leading suppressors of Internet freedom, Iran operates a sophisticated internet censorship regimes and the administrative hierarchy of it includes many players. However, the mechanisms it employs have received little research attention, primarily due to lack of access to network connections within the country and personal risks to Iranian citizens who take part (Aryan, S., Aryan, H., & Alex, 2013). Regardless of these negative attitudes towards Internet censorship, there are also some positive views that censorship provides web users with preventative protection. According to Ozkan & Arikan (2009), 59% of complaint notifications on the internet were about pornography, 11% on child abuse, only 8% about being against the governing party. In addition, there is an interactive map, which was shown the level of each country opened their internet (Blight, Rininsland, Rogers & Torpey, 2012), illustrated that the level of political censorship generally varies inversely with the development of a nation's economy.
Although, a seemingly new era of freedom of expression has been created, there are still plenty of countries which adopt or even formulate more rigid standards for internet censorship for diverse reasons. As one of the most multi-cultural societies on a global scale, Australia has a large international student population, most of whom originate from information-censored environments. Hence, it is essential to survey their knowledge of censorship and their attitudes towards internet censorship. The aim of this research is to investigate the extent of knowledge and views on censorship among overseas students living in Australia. It is hypothesized that most international students know little about internet censorship and they think some online contents should be censored and some should be not.
