Online Social Networks and Government Accountability in Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Censorship, Content Moderation, and Government Accountability

Abstract

Do online social media undermine authoritarianism? This paper examines the conditions under which online social networks increase government accountability in non-democratic regimes, and I argue that social media will only hold autocrats accountable to the public if citizens with large online social networks conduct political petitions through these media. Using natural language processing methods on a corpus of transcripts from the Weibo petition forum in China (Weibo is a Twitter-like social media platform), I firstly show that citizens with a larger number of followers on Weibo not only receive more reposts, likes, and comments on their petitions from other fellow citizens, they are also more likely to receive a response from the government, even if we control for the particular topic of the petition. Second, I find that whether or not a citizen can actually solve her problem through petitioning on Weibo is conditional both on the petitioner's online social networks and on her record of compliance with government policy. Among citizens with a good record of compliance, including providing real contact information in their Weibo ID and rarely posting any content that is censored by the Chinese regime, having more followers on Weibo predicts a higher likelihood of obtaining a government response that effectively addresses the citizen's concerns. Among citizens with a bad record of compliance, however, having more followers predicts a lower likelihood of receiving an effective response from the government. Finally, I find that citizens with numerous online followers and a good record of compliance tend to petition on socio-economic issues, such as provision of public goods, but they are less likely to petition on issues of high sensitivity, such as corruption, red-tape, and police misconduct. Overall, while the efficacy of government response does hinge on how compliant the citizen is deemed by the government, findings of this study suggest that Internet petitions led by citizens with large online networks is a viable mechanism through which social media can improve government accountability in non-democracies.

Author

• Tongtong Zhang, Stanford University