EBP #2 Week 7 - How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay

How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay

by Eda Keremoğlu; Nils B. Weidmann

This article discusses the various ways in which competitive authoritarian regimes can use the internet, and similar technological advancements, to their benefit, in regards to monitoring and policing their citizens political expressions and speech.

The article identities three main applications or “layers” that authoritarian regimes use such technology for: The Infrastructure layer, the Network layer, and the Application layer. Each layer serves a difference purpose, allowing authoritarian governments to enact different degrees of suppression, surveillance or monitoring of its citizens.

The Infrastructure Layer is the broadest, most “basic” layer, dealing with the general basis’s for country wide communication, most notably the physical hardware that allows for modern communication networks. At this level, governments are able to target wide-ranging, if non-specific, areas within their country to monitor or shut-down; for example, lowering the internet bandwidth to specific areas of a country to prevent potential protesters from organizing. The ability to shut-down entire areas of a country to prevent organisation can be effective, but because it is non-specific (i.e. targeting every citizen who lives in the area instead of just those who are actually meaning to take part in protests or anti-government organisation) it is also more overtly non-democratic, as the government is very blatantly hampering their citizens ability to organize, protest or freely express their political beliefs.

The Network layer allows the government to take more specific action towards its citizens, leaving the Infrastructure layer unbroken, while targeting specific ideas or movements. At this layer, the government can use filtering mechanisms to prevent certain phrases or search terms from providing accurate results when searched by citizens using the internet; essentially blocking people from engaging with information or ideas that the government perceives as a threat to its control over its citizens. This article points to China's “Great Firewall” as the prime example of the technology available at this layer, as it allows the Communist Party of China to regulate what information its citizens can access online, as well as the applications they would use to do so.

The final level, the Application Layer, allows authoritarian regimes both the broadest use of power online, as well as the most specific application of said power. This layer allows governments four main mechanisms to control their citizens as well as their access to information.

Firstly, governments can monitor and block search terms or specific information that is still available despite measures that can be taken at the Network Layer; for example, monitoring social media accounts. This technique can also be described as impeding information rather than out right blocking it; creating taxing “paywalls” around certain information, thereby discouraging all but the most determined citizens from accessing it, a technique which the Chinese government also employs.

Secondly, at this level governments can not only prohibit or hamper what kinds of information citizens have access to, but can also ensure that information that is beneficial to the party is more accessible than information that is not, or even make such information the only type that is accessible in the first place. They can do this by seizing the means of communication distribution, thereby controlling what is dispensed into the market, such as controlling social media sites or applications. With this control they can put out pro-party messages, or conversely anti-opposition messages.

Thirdly, technology at this level also allows for increased surveillance and monitoring of citizens. Social media posts, location tracking and online discussion forums can all be used to identify dissidents within a state. This technology can be used to both track down, and thereby punish, citizens who are acting against the party, but can also be used as a deterrent against would-be dissenters; if a citizen is aware that their internet browsing activity is being monitored they will be far less likely to research, or express, any anti-party sentiments.

Fourthly, the internet allows governments to determine matters which have large public support, without necessarily allowing the ideas to have wide public accessibility. What this means is that the authoritarian states can determine what aspects of their rule, or society under their rule, are particularly unsatisfactory to the public, and thereby mitigate any potential dangerous action towards the state because of it, without allowing a large degree of public discourse or discussion between citizens in regards to that issue; thereby potentially leading citizens to solve the matter themselves (i.e. by removing the government).

Using a variety of the above methods and techniques authoritarian governments can, this article argues, avoid explicit violent suppression of political revolt or dissent, and instead maintain control over their citizens with less overt methods. Controlling the means of access to information, as well as the ability to spread said information from citizen to citizen, allows authoritarian governments to prevent anti-party ideas from spreading in the first place, and thus prevents violent dissent from taking place.

Keremoğlu, E., & Weidmann, N. B. (2020). How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay. Comparative Political Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912278