Honor or Control? Defamation, Corruption and Political Online Content Removal (Pre-Recorded)

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

Abstract

The protection of citizens’ privacy, honor, and reputation is a building block of democratic life. However, a long tradition of research suggests that in contexts such as the Latin American, East Asian, and Eastern European, politicians and economic elites use civil and even criminal defamation laws to suppress information on matters of public interest. In recent years, politicians have also relied on defamation laws to shape national internet governance regimes and online content regulation, extending to the online sphere tactics used to restrict offline public interest information. Do politicians rely on defamation laws to conceal evidence of political malfeasance in the online sphere? If so, under what conditions are they more likely to effectively remove online political content?

In this study, I capitalize on individual-level data on corruption proceedings and online political content requests for over 745,000 Brazilian politicians at the federal and local levels who ran for office between 2016 and 2020. Using survival and RDD methods, I estimate the effects of pending corruption investigations and incumbency on patterns of online political content removal requests during electoral campaigns. Evidence shows that Brazilian politicians who are involved in corruption proceedings are over two times more likely to rely on defamation laws to remove online political content during campaigns. Moreover, looking at a subset of over 7,000 politicians who ran for two consecutive elections, I show that incumbency is a significant predictor of requests.

I also find evidence that suggests that the relationship between corruption and rates of online content removal holds beyond the Brazilian case. Using cross-national data on corruption, defamation-related online content removal requests from Google, and a measure of the degree to which governments abuse defamation laws, I show that corruption is positively correlated with increased attempts by governments to remove online content, specifically in non-consolidated democracies.

Author

• Kyong L. Mazzaro, The Graduate Center, CUNY