Contemporary Developments in Digital Authoritarianism Techniques

• In Event: Digital Authoritarianism and Censorship

Abstract

In the early days of the development of cyberspace in the 1990s, many believed that the internet and associated technologies were immune to government regulations. However, over the last two decades, there have been significant shifts in both the availability of the internet and how political regimes across the world have responded to it. Non-democratic governments across the world have attempted to assert political control of the internet through increasingly sophisticated control measures. This trend of increasing efforts to control the internet is often described as Digital Authoritarianism. Although the topic of digital authoritarianism is producing a plethora of new research, the contemporary mechanisms of digital authoritarianism remain understudied. In this paper, I investigate the recent developments in the mechanisms of digital authoritarianism internet with a particular focus on hybrid and authoritarian regimes and South and Southeast Asian countries. Utilizing Automated Text Analysis, particularly the topic modeling method, the paper: first compile a comprehensive list of themes across regimes to draw a taxonomy of these findings and analyze the most recent developments; second, identity regime variations with a particular focus on hybrid and authoritarian regimes; and third, identify regional variations by studying on Southeast and South Asia.

Author

• Fahmida Zaman, University of Delaware