What Do We Know about Social Media in Authoritarian Settings?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Aytalina Kulichkina, whose focus is on the role of social media in authoritarian settings. Social media have been prominent for protests in such contexts, but have also been used by regimes to suppress and undermine protests as well as to identify protesters. The picture remains blurry due to the many contextual differences, the various platforms used, changes over time, and other differing factors, however.

Aytalina therefore conducted a literature review of existing work on these questions, covering the years from 1997 to 2023. Searching for a broad range of keywords in articles, she identified some 716 relevant journal articles for inclusion in the literature review; these were further filtered down for a focus especially on political protest and repression in authoritarian contexts. This left some 433 articles.

A preliminary analysis of abstracts and a subset of these articles highlights a number of emergent patterns in the literature. Most articles examine policy-critical publics, and most examine closed rather than electoral autocracies; a wide range of such countries and regimes around the world are covered in this research. Focus is strongly on Twitter and Weibo, while survey-based studies tend not to focus on any one platform.

Social media activities covered include information seeking, political expression, discussion, mobilisation, and other key practices. Low cost, fast speed, hashtag use, and other features are useful for protests; censorship algorithms, shadow bans, algorithmic manipulation, and hashtag flagging are all useful for repression. High responsiveness by governments, regime type, and Internet control all affect protest efficiency. A wide range of methods were used to study these patterns.