A conference devoted to challenging “digital authoritarianism” is something that IGP can certainly get behind. But what is digital authoritarianism, and was it really being challenged in Italy on October 28 and 29? At the meeting “Decrypting Digital Authoritarianism: How the Use of the Internet Can Threaten Democracy and Human Rights,” I learned a lot about the answers to those questions.
The event was held at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy. The meeting bridged the academic and the political. Most of the presentations and discussions involved academic researchers but the agenda and funding were set by some high-level political developments in the EU. Policy makers from the Commission and Alex Engler from the White House National Security Council were on the program. Esteve Sanz from the Commission’s DG Connect attended the whole thing in person. The meeting also follows closely what seems to be a slightly more liberal shift in the European Commission’s policy stance following the departure of conservative sovereigntist Thierry Breton whose position is now held by Finland’s Henna Virkkunen, the Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy.
The conference was funded by the Global Initiative on the Future of the Internet (GIFI), a European initiative that echoes the U.S. “Declaration on the Future of the Internet.” An opening statement by V?ra Jourová, the outgoing EC Vice President, made it clear that EC politicos understand some of the threats to Internet self-governance: “This model [open and free Internet] that we cherish and defend is under threat. We see the attacks coming from authoritarian regimes use of technologies.to censor, restrict freedoms, monitor, control, and oppress people.” The EU believes that it “has a responsibility to lead in defending the open and free Internet on a global scale.”
This pushback, however, was being framed as democracies vs authoritarian states, us vs them. The them category included mainly Russia and China, but there were informative papers about the backsliding democracies of Eastern Europe, and about Iran, Myanmar, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey and others.
The conference program asserted that “Authoritarian states are increasingly using the Internet in ways that undermine its open, free, safe and secure character,” and expressed concern about whether digital authoritarianism was being exported through Internet-based propaganda, disinformation and election influence. Indeed, the very subtitle of the conference – “how the use of the Internet can threaten democracy and human rights” – hinted at a fear that the technology itself is somehow authoritarian or contributing to it.
Us vs. Them or Us and Them?
As the conference progressed, however, the academic researchers and even some of the politicians began to see that the trend toward a less open and free internet was not so bipolar. It was rooted more in security claims and power competition among states than in technology. The trend is coming from all states, and even from progressive civil society groups who want to assert more control over the online activity of their rightwing opponents.
Akin Unver of Ozyegin University in Turkey noted that France, the US, Poland, Brazil, South Africa, India and Australia have all engaged in disinformation campaigns. And Seraphine Maerz of the University of Melbourne wrote “a range of democratically elected governments also apply practices of digital authoritarianism.”
The U.S. Declaration, for example, was fully discredited early this year when Tim Wu, the Biden Administration appointee who spearheaded it, came out in favor of the TikTok ban. With that move (and many others), the U.S. joined China and other digital authoritarians in claiming that national security – not fundamental rights or human security – is more important than an open internet.
Western efforts to respond to influence operations by Russia and China, and European and Brazilian efforts to regulate “Big Tech,” are creating an infrastructure of content control that could easily be turned to authoritarian ends, if they are not doing so already. A Brazilian civil society member, for example, complained bitterly about how the “anti-censorship argument” had countered their efforts to regulate Big Tech and stifle content coming from their rightwing opponents.
Civil society groups who want stronger regulation of online content, as well as opponents of online harms and child sexual images, are encouraging the creation of the very tools of surveillance and content control that are used by authoritarian states. US efforts to regulate trade in semiconductors or to block or ban applications from adversary nations created a dynamic in which digital infrastructure and information flows are increasingly fragmented jurisdictionally and a part of geopolitical power competitions. If we want to understand the drivers of authoritarian control of ICT, start there.
What is digital authoritarianism?
I believe “digital authoritarian” should be narrowly defined to refer to policies intended to give states control of the digital ecosystem so as to maintain their power by suppressing individual rights and democratic political competition. It denotes a state that represses the production and use of information and communication technologies and services to maintain or expand its power, regardless of the consent or support of its citizens. Generally, this means tight economic regulation of ISPs and platforms, if not state-owned monopolies; data localization laws and other controls on transnational data flows; centralized surveillance of traffic and online identities and their use for repressive purposes, some level of censorship or content regulation biased against political opponents, and the use of a variety of tools for public opinion management on digital media.
In my comments, i noted that because of the way the Internet has globalized information access, efforts to export both authoritarian control and Internet freedom are inevitable. All states are deeply embedded in an interdependent digital ecosystem. Protecting authoritarian states, or national power, in a digitally connected world may involve gatekeeping foreign media and externally focused influence operations, espionage, or cyber-sabotage capabilities, as well as “tech alliances” around digital industrial policy and trade restrictions.
The US used to be the prime exporter of Internet freedom but reversed itself since 2018. I would say the US is now exporting a mild form of digital authoritarianism by promoting neo-mercantilist industrial policies in the digital sector: chip export controls, the Huawei blockade, the Tiktok ban, the targeting of subsea cables based on their ownership, jawboning social media to moderate content. In doing so it is creating a dynamic among other states that legitimizes and reinforces digital authoritarian trends. This involves claiming that national security risks are the primary factors governing all hardware and software, which leads to excluding adversaries’ service and hardware providers from the US market and urging other states to do the same. These US actions are based on the same logic as China’s digital authoritarianism, which involves protectionist barriers against foreign providers, influence operations using social media as well as censorship of incoming services. The US moves legitimize the barriers erected by other states.
Technology is more neutral than you thought
There is still a lot of misunderstanding about the role of technology in this picture. Old illusions that digital tech would be inherently liberating are now being replaced by its mirror image, the idea that the tech itself is ushering in authoritarian control worldwide. Both ideas draw on the questionable but fashionable idea that “technology is not neutral” or that its “affordances” push social systems into specific political configurations. I reject the idea that a particular technology of any kind is “authoritarian,” or libertarian for that matter. Authoritarianism is a characteristic of a society’s political institutions, not an inherent feature of a technology.
Communications technology, like all technology, is instrumental. It is something that people (both good guys and bad guys) use to pursue their own ends. Humans have agency, the technology itself does not. Different humans and organized groups have different goals, and thus the uses of technology will serve different ends. Tech makes a big difference in the relative power of groups not because it “has politics” but because of differentials in the way political actors access and use it. Everyone – authoritarians, libertarians and everything in between – is going to be using whatever ICT is available in ways that serve their ends. The issue is whether their use successfully achieves a competitive advantage. That advantage may come because they get their hands on its enhanced powers first, (as Protestants did with the printing press, or American companies did with the Internet in the 1990s) or from innovative applications of the technology, or (in the content/applications layer) by innovative semantic moves that resonate with the population, such as framing immigration as an invasion or convincing people that child sexual abuse can be stopped by focusing on the Internet. In competitions for political power, just as in competitions for money, some groups can gain relative to others by making more effective use of communication capabilities.
Authoritarians will come up with applications of digital communications technology that promote their particular political ends just as advertisers of toothpaste will come up with applications that promote sales of their product. Obama’s 2008 election campaign made innovative use of social media that contributed to his election, just as the 2016 Trump campaign came up with some innovative uses of Facebook data to identify and mobilize their constituencies. It’s an endless back-and-forth struggle. If we want to understand the rise of autocrats or the decline of liberalism we need to examine how and why some groups win these battles in particular historical and social contexts, not at the secular “spread” of digital technologies.
Some notable papers
Nearly 30 academic papers were presented at the conference. I was not able to read or even attend all of them but there is talk of a proceedings or edited collection. Some highlights of ones that I read or saw:
Ana Jovanovic-Harrington (University of Dublin) on how the Serbian state has set up an organized system of coordinated inauthentic behavior on domestic social media platforms by telling low-level state employees which online content to respond to and what to say and paying them for their efforts.
Chun-Ting Ho and Fabio Votta (University of Amsterdam) tracked China’s “soft propaganda” on Meta by systematically collecting data about its payments for Meta ads.
Aybuke Atalay (University of Edinburgh) described the complex “bot ecologies” of Turkey and how automated tools both amplify and challenge governmental narratives.
Danielle Flonk (Hitotsubashi University) and Maria Debre (Zeppelin University) explained why autocracies are promoting multilateralism: to exclude nonstate actors from global governance and to legitimate autocratic practices.
Martina Lucaccini (University of Rome) provided a data-rich study of how autocracies respond to a digitally mobilized transnational public with “transnational digital repression” based on cross-border cooperation (e.g., arrest, assassination, extradition) and targeted digital threats (surveillance, hacking, malware, online harassment).
Conclusion: Mixed Signals
The good news here is that Europe is seeing a threat to communicative freedom and is devoting resources to combating that trend. It is also good news that the academics, activists and some policy makers concerned about digital authoritarianism are realizing that it is not entirely about “us” liberal democratic good guys vs “them” geopolitical bad guys. The drivers of systemic control are present on both sides, and the competition for geopolitical power between state actors is largely responsible for the authoritarian trend. The academic researchers involved in this debate need to be careful that they are not coopted into supporting certain kinds of repression in that competition. Keep the fundamental rights of the individual uppermost in mind and don’t get drawn into any state’s geopolitical agenda.
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Source: Internet Governance Forum