One of the persistent questions since the internet began to be widely used globally has been about the relationship between internet access and political protest. Some have argued that the internet is a powerful tool for opposition, providing new opportunities for information gathering and dissemination and reducing the friction of mobilization. Others have contended that the internet is instead a boon for oppressive governments, giving them the ability to exercise enormous control over the technology and use it to demobilize and repress opposition groups. Focusing on this question in autocracies, Nils B. Weidman and Espen Geelmuyden Rød argue in The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies that neither of these perspectives captures the full nuances of the relationship between the internet and political protest in repressive regimes.
The authors instead suggest that the internet has different impacts on different phases of the protest process. They argue that, because the government is able both to control the infrastructural development of the internet and to monitor and censor information online, the internet actually serves to reduce the emergence of protest in the long term. Conversely, because government control is imperfect, once protests begin, higher levels of internet penetration should help them persist and spread. This theory differs from both the theoretical and empirical findings of much of the work on the topic to date, and so it opens up important new areas for exploration.
This book contributes to a growing literature on the relationship between new digital technologies and protest, one that has its roots in early protests of the digital age but that has exploded in recent years, particularly as social media have increased in popularity. Given the novelty of the theoretical contribution, the book would have benefited from a deeper engagement with why the authors used a different theoretical approach from other scholars, and why they think their results differed from some previous work. This deeper discussion would have illuminated the proposed mechanisms more clearly and helped flesh out in more depth the areas of agreement and disagreement.
Theorizing the relationship between the internet and protest differently for different phases of the protest process is an important new approach, and it allows for much more nuanced theorizing about how new technologies might affect the protest process in varied ways. Nonetheless, I was left with a few questions about the theoretical mechanisms that I outline here.
The book’s theory rests on the idea that the government has asymmetrical control over the internet and that, for this reason, the internet should not increase, but rather decrease, protest emergence. Although this asymmetry is certainly the case, the authors do not clearly show how this control compares to that exercised over other means of organizing or communicating. If the government has control over all forms of communication in a country to some extent, the question is not only whether they also have control over the internet, but whether they have more, less, or the same amount of control over the internet than over other forms of communication technology that might be used for organizing, as well as what the trade-offs are. One can imagine an internet that is monitored and controlled by the government but that is still a net improvement over previous means of organizing. This impact also might vary among countries and is something that would be interesting to explore in more depth in future work.
Similarly, because this control over the internet is assumed to be a feature of autocracies, it is not engaged with or measured directly. From the perspective of the authors’ theory, the protest-repressing effect should be dependent not on the state’s hypothetical ability to control the internet, but on its de facto capacity and willingness to exercise that control (or perhaps on people’s perceptions of that capacity and willingness). This is not homogeneous across the countries in the study. The Afghan or Namibian government does not have the same capacity to control the internet as does the Chinese or Russian government. The authors do use country-level random effects to try to account for country-level differences. A potential alternate explanation for the book’s empirical findings, however, is that rather than the internet being associated with depressed protest emergence in general in autocracies, it may be the case that it depresses protest emergence in cases with high government control of the internet, which is on average, but not universally, higher in autocracies. This is an important distinction, because this would suggest that the internet might increase or have no impact on levels of protest emergence in autocracies with a poor capacity or willingness to exercise control over the internet—and, conversely, might depress protest emergence in democracies that do exercise greater control. The authors account for the various levels of control exercised by autocratic regimes in general in chapter 9, but do not address the fact that this is also true of their control of the internet in particular.
Finally, to the extent that governments have both the capacity and willingness to exercise such control, it is not clear exactly why the authors believe that this will have only a long-term impact rather than a short-term impact on protest. The government in some places might actually be much more able to take short-term action as protests emerge (for example, by shutting the internet down temporarily) than they are able to exercise consistent long-term control through tactics like censorship or information operations. If this is the case, it would undermine parts of the theoretical arguments that the authors make and is a question that future work should engage.
In addition to the theoretical contributions of the book, it also has important analytical improvements over most previous work on the topic. The authors measure internet penetration through the estimation of data traffic flows rather than country-level telecom reports, which should provide a more accurate measure of internet usage. Additionally, this allows them to disaggregate their analysis to the city, rather than the country, level. Thus, they are able not only to explore the relationship between greater internet penetration in countries and the level of protest in those countries, but also to actually understand whether particular areas with higher levels of internet usage also have higher instances of protest. This is certainly an improvement over most existing large-N studies. This approach allows for a much more fine-grained comparison, which is particularly important in the context of internet usage that varies substantially within countries.
I was, however, disappointed that the period of analysis only extended from 2004–12. This is both a relatively short time period and does not cover much of the most important boom in internet usage, particularly in developing economies, which many of the countries in the study are. Although the authors largely leave aside the question of social media in particular, the widespread use of mobile technologies and lightweight social media apps has dramatically changed the way that people use the internet and has implications for the underlying theories about government control on which the authors rely. It would be interesting to know whether these results hold if they are extended to the present day and how they interact with social media usage levels.
Overall, the book is an incredibly important contribution, both empirically and theoretically, to our understanding of how new technologies have an impact on protest. It reveals new questions and new lines of inquiry that I look forward to seeing explored further in future work and should certainly be read by anybody with an interest in the internet and political behavior or in contention in the digital age.
