How The Internet Empowers And Endangers Protest Movements
Keena Wiegert
Ika Karlina Idris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Indonesian government has blocked internet access as they deployed security forces to its easternmost provinces following days of violent protests there. Papuans took to the streets following arrests and racist treatments of Papuan students over the weekend in East Java.
In May 2019, the government also limited internet access after protests contesting the presidential election results led to riots on the streets of Jakarta. They gave the same explanation: to prevent the spread of hoaxes.
Papua region in Indonesia comprising of two provinces, Papua and West Papua, is a restricted area for foreign journalists. The government requires foreign media to go through complicated administrative procedures to obtain permits to go there.
The government has, for a long time, been limiting information access from Papua to suppress separatist movements fighting for independence from Indonesia. These separatist movements in Papua emerged as a response to discontent regarding a 1969 referendum that decided Papua would be part of Indonesia. Even though the referendum took place under the supervision of the United Nations, only 1,022 delegations from Papua were involved, handpicked by authorities in Jakarta.
When media freedom is limited, social media and the internet plays a role in helping journalists find a diverse source of information. They can get information not only from authorities but also from local residents.
This shared awareness is important to help society become aware of the problems that they encounter around them. With this understanding and awareness, an issue can evolve to become an agenda for public discussion.
In the context of Papua, without the internet, it would be difficult for a group of people that experience injustice and discrimination to tell their stories to foster the much-needed awareness of these injustices.
A research by media scholar Chang Sup Park from the University at Albany, United States, on online speech in South Korea and the United States shows that a culture of democracy grows best in environments that promote the free expression of its citizens.
They say that the internet block by the government during the May 22 riots was warranted, as it aims to protect the public from even more riots that might arise from fake news circulating on social media.
Those under threat are not only Papuans but also all Indonesians. The media cannot access information from the region, so the ability of journalists and citizens to share information is pretty much crippled.
We further examine these disparate effects by examining four case studies, each representing a different combination of state capacity (weak vs. strong) and regime type (democratic vs. authoritarian). We argue that, contrary to the optimistic promise of social media platforms at the beginning of the millennium, it seems that they are having a weakening effect on strong democratic regimes, an intensifying effect on strong authoritarian regimes, a radicalizing effect on weak democratic regimes, and a destabilizing effect on weak authoritarian ones. We conclude by presenting the implications of our analysis for the future of the international system.
Fake news finds fertile ground in a divided electorate that has clear in-groups and out-groups, where people are ready to accept any statement as long it is consistent with what they already believe.48 Extreme examples of fake news spread by social media platforms can be found in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the dissemination of hate speech contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims and anti-Muslim riots, respectively.49
Authoritarian and illiberal regimes also use social media knowledge power, together with artificial intelligence, as a monitoring tool, allowing them to collect and analyze vast amounts of data on entire populations.
In conclusion, social media can play a positive or a negative role: It can be a liberalizing tool, used to spread information and knowledge, but it can also be a tool of suppression, used to disseminate distorted information and fake news. Grassroots movements and freedom fighters can make use of social media platforms, but so can authoritarian regimes.
Social media platforms can also be effective in bolstering authoritarian regimes, which may help explain why, in the years after the Arab Spring, there were fewer revolutions in weak authoritarian regimes.
Social media is a low-cost and convenient communication tool that can be used by opposition populists to reach their supporters, by the governing regime to engage directly with the electorate, and by malign external forces to spread fake news. These platforms can be exploited to spread fake news and narratives that are polarizing, divisive, and anti-liberal because they lack the fact-checking found in traditional media outlets. Social media helps populists (both as candidates and as part of the governing regime) to aggregate and unify people to promote a shared cause against the liberal establishment and liberal freedoms and to erode democratic pillars. Malign external actors use social media to intervene in democratic elections in weak democratic countries to cause further erosion of trust in the democratic system. These combined actions create a radicalizing effect in weak liberal democracies that can potentially turn a liberal-democratic regime into an illiberal regime, or even an autocratic one.
Democratic principles further erode when candidates such as Bolsonaro, who use social media manipulation as part of their campaign strategy, continue with these tactics after assuming power and becoming part of the governing regime.
Between 2000 and 2017, 60 percent of all dictatorships faced at least one anti-government protest of 50 participants or more. Ten authoritarian regimes fell during this period and 19 were replaced through elections, many of which came in the wake of mass protests.139 According to Democracy Report 2020, pro-democracy protests reached an all-time high in 2019 as people took to the streets to protest the erosion of democracies and to challenge dictators.140 The leaderless nature of 2019 Hong Kong protests against China, for example, was made possible by social media. Protesters took their cues from more than 100 groups on the instant messaging app Telegram, dozens of Instagram pages, and online forums like LIHKG. These groups were used to post everything from news on upcoming protests and tips on defending oneself from tear gas canisters fired by the police to the identities of suspected undercover police and the access codes to buildings in Hong Kong where protesters could hide.141 Overseas Chinese dissidents and activists played a crucial role by assisting and even guiding activists in Hong Kong. Chinese expatriates connected with those in Hong Kong via social media to get information about what was going on to journalists, non-governmental organizations, and activists in other countries.142
China and Russia have started to proliferate their models of digital authoritarianism across the globe. China is exporting its digital tools for domestic censorship and surveillance to different countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. Russia is disseminating its tightened information control model coupled with intimidation of internet service providers, telecom providers, private companies, and civil society groups.
To summarize, American social media platforms may intensify the power of strong authoritarian regimes by helping them, directly and indirectly, to become digital dictatorships. They use the knowledge power of compliant platforms as part of their surveillance machine while blocking those platforms that refuse to play by their rules.
China and Russia export their restrictive practices to other authoritarian states, helping them to adopt similar practices in their countries. Russia also uses social media platforms as tools to apply sharp power against liberal-democratic countries around the world.
Whatever action U.S. policymakers decide to take, it is imperative that they act quickly. Disinformation and fake news will continue to materialize on social media platforms in new ways that cannot be easily countered. Without taking strict and prompt action, democracies around the world will continue suffering the weakening and radicalizing effects of social media that some of them already suffer today.
Abstract Every day across the world, as people assemble, demonstrate and protest, their pictures, their messages, tweets and other personal information are amassed without adequate justification. Arguing that they do so in order to protect assemblies, governments deploy a wide array of measures, including facial recognition, fake mobile towers and internet shutdowns. These measures are primarily analyzed as interferences with the right to privacy and freedom of expression, but it is argued here that protest and other assembly surveillance should also be understood as an infringement of freedom of assembly. This is necessary not only to preserve the distinct nature of freedom of assembly that protects collective action, but also to allow for better regulation of surveillance and interference with internet communications during assemblies.* Many thanks to Valentina Cadelo and Tomaso Falchetta for their input on the latest version of this article. The views expressed in this article reflect those of the author.
The ability to assemble, dissent and protest peacefully is a key element in every society, democratic or otherwise.1 In 2019 alone, there were more than 100 protests in numerous countries around the globe.2 Digital technologies have to a certain degree enabled and facilitated these movements as they have been used to coordinate conversations, raise awareness, encourage participation and generate support.3 At the same time, these same technologies and other means have been increasingly used to surveil and suppress such movements.
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