Propaganda in Digital Authoritarianism: How Are Chinese Citizens Persuaded?

• In Event: Public Opinion and Political Trust in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

Propaganda is deemed crucial for sustaining authoritarian regime. In the past decades, scholars have fierce discussions on how hard and soft propaganda are used to maintain authoritarian rule and recent research has extended the topics to digital technologies that widely adopted to shape public attitudes and individual behaviors. Yet, little do we know if and how the propaganda of the digital technologies, particularly big data and artificial intelligence technologies, might shape individuals’ opposition and support for authoritarian ruling. This paper focuses on the phenomenon in China that individuals perceive data as privacy rights and resources that owned and produced by themselves in the digital age, while they seem willingly to yield their rights and resources for governments. Propaganda in this context plays an important role to construct the use of digital technologies and data collection process by government to be safe, while framing the acts of commercial actors to be threatening. Despite of the intrusion of digital technologies on personal privacy data and the aroused popular concerns on surveillance, in align with previous research, Chinese citizens consequently have more confidence in authorities to protect their data compared to commercial enterprises. Individuals are willing to trade off their privacy data with governments for security and collective societal ambitions. However, how and to what extent the existing propaganda of digital technologies work to persuade citizens to yield their privacy data for collective social targets have not been addressed.

Based on an original online survey experiment of 3,000 respondents in China in 2023, this paper provides explanation for the question that how propaganda of digital technologies shapes people’s willingness to share privacy data with authorities. More specifically, it studies the impacts of propaganda on China’s online population who are target of the Party’s digital propaganda campaign. Treatment groups are designed with diverse dimensional propaganda of digital technologies to be compared with the control group. This paper mainly extends the existing theories of propaganda and information manipulation to sustain control in authoritarian regimes, and it presents theoretical extensions for digital authoritarianism. By providing experimental evidence that to what extent propaganda can work when it comes to personal privacy data, the study will show how individuals in authoritarian context make compromise for collective societal ambitions and how much they are persuaded by the rule of digital authoritarianism.

Authors

• Hao Zhang, Freie Universität Berlin

• Genia Kostka, Freie Universität Berlin