Authoritarian use of social media

Authoritarian governments use social media to consolidate their power, undermine democratic movements, spread rumours, sway elections, track democracy activists, manipulate public opinion, seed distrust in democratic institutions and distract citizens from political issues. States like Russia, China and Iran aim to undermine Western democracy norms, viewing these norms as a threat to authoritarian control (Kreko 2017). In an age of decreasing trust in legacy media and declining trust in government, authoritarians wage psychological operations on their own population, as well as those in other countries, via social media. Table 2.4 summarises the variety of ways authoritarian states use social media to surveil and repress.

Some governments seem to be sharing a playbook of tactics to suppress their political opponents, minority groups, and democracy and human rights activists.

Digital info, conflict and democracy 37

While legacy media outlets rely on “gatekeepers” and “fact-checkers” to maintain coherent, truthful public information, governments can now hire trolls to create take news websites, publish millions of deceptive posts and never be held accountable.

On a mass scale, state-run “troll farms” or “web brigades”, particularly from Russia and China, use social media to harass and repress journalists, minorities and government critics. In some countries, the government-hired “troll armies” and “digital militias” mobilise citizens to spread disinformation. Robots or “bots” flood the internet with stories and memes intended to deceive, confuse and distract people, aiming to undermine democracy and stability. Filipino President Dutertc’s authoritarian approach to governing includes the use of “patriotic trolling” by troll armies of fake accounts that harass journalists and critics of the regime (Etter, Silver, and Frier 2017). In India, Prime Minister Modi’s troll armies threaten political opponents and journalists critiquing anti-Muslim policies. Russia and China censor and remove posts aimed at mobilising social movements or expressing grievances against the government. Instagram (owned by Facebook) agreed to a Russian government request to block the website of opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny (Troianovski 2018). Several of the chapter authors in this volume noted it is particularly challenging to combat false information when the government, including law enforcement, such as police and military, are involved in propagating information disorders.

Government attempts to proscribe dangerous speech are being used to suppress civil society and democratic dissent. In some states, criminal law is used against civil society activists and journalists rather than the producers of disinformation. States are enacting new legislation that does not respect international human rights standards including freedom of expression and privacy. As detailed in several chapters in this book, some states are introducing new “cybercrime laws” under the guise of combatting false information. But these new laws are being used to damp down on free speech, journalists, activists and dissenting opinions by falsely designating them as terrorists.

In The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger details how authoritarian governments like Russia are perfecting their psychological cyberattacks to foment conflict and increase polarisation through planting deceptive propaganda on social media (Sanger 2018). The Russian term dezinformatsiya refers to the attempt to “destabilize” public trust in the media and other public institutions through psychological operations aiming to foster approval for authoritarian leadership, both within Russia and in other countries (Jack 2017).

In his book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, David Patrikarakos observes that the “narrative dimensions of war” are at the centre of the battle for control over governance (Patrikarakos 2017). In LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking argue authoritarians use social media platforms as weapons to manipulate public beliefs and undermine democratic institutions and civil society movements (Singer and Brooking 2018).

States also use social media to cause chaos, a crisis in meaning or to distract the public to divert their attention away from government corruption or repression. Russia is known not only for spreading rampant disinformation but also for a strategy of causing chaos. The RT (formerly Russia Today) news channel covers a wide range of topics and scandals, some valid news and some false propaganda. The goal is to create a sense of chaos and confusion, a collapse of meaning—the opposite of good journalism (Elswah and Howard 2020).

In China, the term Xuanchuan or “strategic distraction” describes the government’s attempt to distract the public away from controversial stories by flooding social media with inaccurate information or fluff information, such as entertainment news or personal interest stories. By some estimates, the Chinese government employs two million people to make up 448 million posts aimed at “strategic distraction” each year. These are called “50 cent” posts because the people in China’s “keyboard army” are reportedly paid half a dollar for each post (King, Pan, and Roberts 2017).

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World gives a dystopian vision of governments controlling the public not through force, but by overstimulating an overwhelmed and emotionally detached population with superficial entertainment. People’s endless scrolling through social media is already described as a drug enabling authoritarianism (Sampson 2017).