Digital Authoritarianism

For authoritarian regimes, exercising comprehensive rule increasingly requires control of the digital public sphere. To finance the costly expansion of internet infrastructure, authoritarian governments often turn to foreign direct investment — in many cases from other autocracies. Lisa Garbe and her co-authors Seraphine Maerz (Uni Melbourne) and Tina Freyburg (Uni St. Gallen) have examined these relationships using data from African countries.

Their study shows that the more repressive an authoritarian regime is offline, the greater the involvement of investors from other autocratic states in its internet infrastructure. When more investment flows in from other autocracies, the less of a deterrent effect it has on the use of the internet for online repression. Using data from the “Telecommunications Ownership and Control” dataset, the authors showed that authoritarian regimes significantly expand their online repression as soon as at least one internet service provider is owned by a foreign autocratic investor.

The circle of foreign investors extends far beyond large autocracies and includes countries around the world, such as Vietnam and Qatar. This reveals a broad and heterogeneous network of autocratic states that contributes to the expansion of digital control capacities.

The study is part of a special issue of the journal Democratization on “Authoritarian Informationalism,” co-edited by Lisa Garbe. The term refers to the effective interplay of offline and online tactics to make surveillance, manipulation, and control of information a central means of political power. The journal examines the impact of growing digital tools on the resilience of authoritarian regimes.

Overall, the studies show that digitalization expands authoritarian informational power without changing its core objectives. At the meta-level, this means that digital technologies can strengthen the resilience of authoritarian regimes: they expand the reach of surveillance, increase the sophistication of propaganda and manipulation, and lower the costs of suppressing dissenting opinions. At the same time, however, they also create new dependencies on transnational infrastructures and non-state actors. This creates vulnerabilities that can paradoxically limit authoritarian control.