Crushing Digital Pluralism: The Evolving Digital Practices of Authoritarianism (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Increasingly, authoritarian regimes are adopting a variety of digital methods to suppress political participation and human rights. By producing computational propaganda, weaponizing information, shutting down the Internet, and adopting advanced methods of surveillance and Internet filtering, these governments crush dissident movements and close the digital spaces. This panel brings together a diverse array of qualitative and quantitative methods, approaches, cases, and perspectives to understand the evolving practices of digital repression around the world. By looking comparatively across multiple country-contexts, as well as deeply at specific country-cases, we provide a unique and comprehensive view of the evolving practices of digital suppression. We examine the impact of digital repression on the Syrian Arab Spring movement’s online tactical innovations. Using data from African countries between 2010 and 2020, we shed light on diffusion and learning mechanisms towards select forms of Internet shutdowns as regimes adapt to mutating threats. In addition to exploring these domestic suppressive approaches, our panel also compares the cybersecurity preparedness of independent and state-aligned news sites across different regime types, while also comparing how the language of securitization is adopted by different regime types to legitimize censorship and suppression.

Sub Unit

• Division 40: Information Technology, & Politics

Individual Presentations

• The Cybersecurity of Online Political News: Evidence from a World-Wide Web Scan - Alexei Sisulu Abrahams, Harvard Kennedy School

• Unpacking the Effect of Regime Types on Responses to Misinformation - Samantha Bradshaw, Stanford University; Gabrielle Lim, Harvard University; Carly Maya Miller, Stanford Internet Observatory

• The Digital Tactical Innovation of the Syrian Arab Spring Movement (Pre-Recorded) - Mona Elswah, University of Oxford

Chair

• Marc Owen Jones Hamad bin Khalifa University

Discussant

• Lisa Garbe