Browsing by Subject "Networked authoritarianism"

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Open Access
To share or not to share? How emotional judgments drive online political expression in high-risk contexts
(SAGE Publishing, 2020) Dal, Ayşenur; Nisbet, E. C.
Previous scholarship on networked authoritarianism has examined an array of repressive legal and political strategies employed by regimes to constrain online political expression. How the tension between citizens’ desires to engage in online political expression and the possible dire consequences of doing so is resolved, however, is understudied. We address this lacuna by drawing upon concepts from risk and decision-making research and examining how the emotional and cognitive components of risk and decision-making shape citizens’ online political expression. Employing a three-wave panel survey of Turkish internet users collected over 8 months, our fixed-effects regression analyzes show that anticipatory emotions drive expressive behavior, but that risk assessment does not. Furthermore, the influence of negative emotions on online expression is moderated by individuals’ degree of regime opposition. We discuss the importance of understanding the psychological mechanisms by which networked authoritarian contexts influences citizens’ decisions to engage in contentious online speech.
Open Access
Walking through firewalls: Circumventing censorship of social media and online content in a networked authoritarian context
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2022-11-19) Dal, Aysenur; Nisbet, Erik C.
The early hopes of the internet as a technology of “liberation” have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even the most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication experience of citizens. Yet, the scholarship examining the underlying motivations and what influences individuals to employ censorship circumvention technologies (CCTs) in authoritarian contexts remains underdeveloped. We present a theoretical model of how state-sponsored political identity and attitudes about media freedom influence motivated resistance to censorship in the case of using CCTs to access social media and other forms of online content in the networked authoritarian context of Iran. Employing a web-based survey of internet users (N = 807), we test this theoretical model across a range of censored online content types. Our findings show that regime ideology in Iran indirectly influences CCT use through biasing perceptions of media freedom and how people respond to it in the form of motivated resistance. We discuss theoretical and policy-related implications for resilience to censorship of social media and online content in networked authoritarian contexts. © The Author(s) 2022.