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Since the Iranian protests began on September 16, 2022, social media has been inundated with images and videos of women bravely confronting over four decades of authoritarian control over their bodies by cutting their hair, burning their mandatory hijabs, and remaining steadfast in the face of batons and bullets attempting to force them into submission. For people outside this context, digital visual content has been their first point of contact with this movement. They see and learn about the grievances of Iranian people and the government’s continued violence upon its own citizens – in a sense, processing the meanings of dissent, repression, and resistance – as they play out in the images. But outside of their symbolic functions as movement “memorabilia,” social media visuals also play an important role for protestors and affect the evolution of activism itself. Images and videos of the Iranian movement build on over nine years of prior digital visual activism. Past content both formed a script for future instantiations of protest – the likes of which we have seen over the past few weeks – and helped create a foundation for women’s grievances against the regime to take shape. Social movement scholars need to take this content seriously in light of such developments, especially as they relate to the dynamics of on and offline activism that remain of special interest to the literature.
Studies on visuals hold a marginal position in the literature compared to text-based social media research on, for example, tweets or comments. But such studies tell us a lot about why visuals form a significant part of digital interactions.[1] Visual content has unique cognitive effects which often helps to generate more interest in a movement. Because “words can only speak of one thing at a time, but images arrive holistically, (making) everything present simultaneously,” they are especially well suited to amplify the emotions of sadness or rage that motivate people to take part in protest. Visuals are also an important medium of activist communication and, importantly, because of their combined effects in engaging audiences and sustaining interest in social mobilization, help movements gain visibility in the public sphere.
My own research on Iran’s “My Stealthy Freedom” movement builds on these insights in authoritarian settings. Since 2014, Iranian women and girls have taken photos and videos of themselves partaking in publicly banned activities from unveiling to singing and dancing as a protest to Iran’s gender discriminatory policies. I argue that this content poses a challenge to the Iranian regime’s control over spatial settings, social norms, and gender roles, the likes of which others argue are significant to its hold on power. Images of women walking unveiled in heavily trafficked public spaces such as markets or town squares, and doing so without provoking male attention, challenge the Islamic Republic’s rhetoric on the hijab as a form of protection from sexual harm. It also challenges the role that men and women play in such environments and, at the same time, imagines a future without such laws by allowing people to prefiguratively live out the aims of protest.
As with other forms of social activism under repressive regimes, many of the movement’s activists have faced public confrontations, fines, and arrests in conjunction with their protest. One of My Stealthy Freedom’s campaigns has attempted to tackle this kind of backlash by documenting and sharing such negative interactions, shedding light on women’s experiences with the regime’s coercive apparatus. Recordings of women being beaten by plain-clothes officers or shoved into morality police vans for refusing to veil are reminiscent of many of the images and videos coming out of Iran today. In this sense, today’s content builds on a multi-year visual archive of past images showing both the level of state violence on women who defy sexist policies and women’s resistance to such attacks on their bodily autonomy.
Such interactions between today’s on-the-ground protests and past digital mobilization are visible in the way content continues to take shape. Some of the images, for example, of women at daily protest sites throughout Iran are reminiscent of prior photos staged using similar poses. In many instances, women weaponized public propaganda in defiance of the regime, embedding images with the same meanings of resistance that have become symbolic of today’s protest pictures.
In other examples, an unveiled woman boldly walking alongside a “mullah” (or religious leader often thought to enforce the regime’s policies) speaks to earlier pictures capturing fleeting moments of solitary protest using the same figure. Groups of schoolgirls, who for weeks have participated in chants, marches, strikes, and sit-ins against the regime, also draw on past tactics, leveraging the tools of the classroom to demonstrate their agency and protest to higher authority.
These juxtapositions between past and present content suggest an ongoing conversation between activists of a non-hierarchical movement in deciding the tactics that effectively bring them attention, elucidate their grievances, and shape their demands. Past content helped bring women-specific issues to the forefront of the Iranian public sphere, creating a foundation for today’s protests to build from. It also created a script for future activists to follow in acting out their resistance to the regime, following what one Iranian writer calls an “unconscious perform(ance) of those things (she) had seen other protestors do.” Images circulated online thus represent more than just visual representations of a movement but in many instances are part and parcel of the movement itself. They enact new forms of political participation and, as has been the case with the Iranian movement, may also foreshadow the crossover to mass public demonstration.
[1] Prior research suggests that images and videos make up a significant chunk of online protest interactions. For example, social media images accounted for 50% of online interactions during the Egyptian Uprising in 2011. Additionally, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have surfaced as visual-based modes of digital social interaction, countering media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which are more text-heavy.
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There is a growing interest in the growth and impact of digital repression on protest and civic engagement globally. Yet this interest has been diffused across Communication, Political Science, Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Sociology creating challenges for generative conversations and building a community of scholars studying the topic. Earl, Maher, and Pan’s recent article “The Digital Repression of Social Movements, Protest, and Activism: a synthetic review” attempts to synthesize these literatures by using a framework that distinguishes between who is responsible, whether it is overt or covert, and whether acts as a carrot (channeling) or a stick (coercion). The essays in this Dialogue are intended to continue this work of building a cross-disciplinary community of scholars interested in questions of digital repression, and to open a conversation about other ways to build this cross-disciplinary community and/or what we still need to build this community. We ask authors to reflect on their own work and their views on community building and/or reflect on what aspects of the framework are helpful, what it misses, and what we still have to learn about how digital repression operates globally.
We have four outstanding contributors. Many thanks for their contributions on this topic:
We would also like to give special thanks to Thomas V. Maher and Jennifer Earl, who proposed and organized this wonderful dialogue.
Current Editors in Chief,
Rory McVeigh, Chang Liu and Natalie Bourman-Karns
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Earl, Maher, and Pan (2022) present a fascinating synthesis of existing knowledge of digital repression across scholarly disciplines. The typology they apply and extend to frame digital repression highlights who uses digital repression and how it depresses and structures mobilization and dissent actions. In so doing, they center digital repression on existing understandings of how repression attempts to constrain dissent and illuminate what repression studies do not yet know about digital repression and how it functions.
One next step that scholars can take to further understand digital repression is to study how the different actors who engage in these tactics strategically interact with each other and with dissidents to predict and explain dissent outcomes. Scholars of communications, language, data science, and other disciplines will better predict and explain digital repression if they have clearer expectations of unobservable repression.
More recent scholarship on the repression-dissent nexus has made significant strides in understanding the strategic interaction of the state and dissent actors—how mutual anticipation of one another’s choices informs what happens in practice (Pierskalla 2010; Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2011; Ritter 2014; Lehmann and Tyson 2022). Both the state and the dissidents think ahead, considering the likelihood that the other will respond to their activities with damaging, costly, or dangerous consequences. Many dissidents will self-censor to avoid such outcomes, leaving only the more resolved, strong, or stalwart dissidents among those who will act (Ritter 2014). Governments will similarly anticipate dissent actions and use preventive measures to avoid more costly outcomes (Danneman and Ritter 2014). These forward-looking behaviors imply that repressive effects on dissent actions (and vice versa) may be happening but lead to the absence of either or both outcomes in practice—and in data.
In many cases, dissidents take action not to disrupt but instead to inform governments of grievances (Lohmann 1993; Gause 2022). Concessions to address those grievances may be costly, leading the government to repress to shut down the demands (Klein and Regan 2018). In contrast, accommodating narrow demands can benefit the government and avoid future costs, leading governments—including China—to allow and encourage some types of dissent without repressing them (O’Brien and Li 2006; Lorentzen 2013). Identifying the function of the dissent action helps to predict whether the government will respond with repression (because it is threatening disruption) or accommodation (because the demand is narrow or too costly to repress).
Considering these assumptions together—that the actors are strategic and purposive, and dissent can be disruptive or informative—in the context of digital repression implies some difficulty of observation and measurement that social and data scientists should bear in mind in their research (see Ritter and Conrad 2016 for more on the implications for observational studies). Internet shutdowns will prevent dissent, leading to its absence. But a live internet does not necessarily predict dissent activity or activist communication if the dissidents anticipate censorship or more direct repression from authorities. Many dissidents will convey information or grievance in other ways while others will self-censor entirely.
Zero observable repression does not equate to the absence of repression. Data scientists will greatly benefit from a theory informing their models of the data-generating process that accounts for strategic expectations and “missing” data.
Another way in which Earl, Maher, and Pan (2022) innovate in their synthesis is by reminding scholars of repression that private actors are a part of the process of repressing dissent. They are right to point to the dearth of knowledge about how private actors repress to prevent dissent, both in general and especially in digital repression. Political science researchers tend to focus on actors in the public, political arena as the primary agents of repression—national and local government authorities. But private actors prevent dissent as well, via community rules for shared social media and civilian shaming or harassment practices. In general, social scientists have a long way to go to understand private repressors.
As in the research on strategic interaction I describe above, a particular area for future study is in the collaborative process by which state actors encourage or facilitate private actors to restrict speech and activism, channel behavior away from protest, or surveil activity for government action. In a sense, this is a principal-agent relationship, where state actors explicitly or implicitly delegate repressive tasks to companies, organizations, or private citizens. So how does this process work? How do state actors collaborate with and delegate to private actors as a repressive cohort or repressive network? How do they coordinate?
Further, how would we know repression when it is carried out by private actors, and how can we identify state participation in such actions? This type of interaction is another way in which data is likely to be misleading. Complex data modeling may be able to account for this process and connect state policies or actions to coordinated private repression. Again, a clear theory that captures the data-generating process of connected intents and activities will help identify behaviors as collaborative. And here is where digital activities may help scholars to better understand private repression: in-person, private repression is often just that—private—but digital behaviors are available for study. It may be one of the best opportunities yet to understand the process of repression, and thereby undermine it.
References
Danneman, Nathan, and Emily Hencken Ritter. 2014. “Contagious Rebellion and Preemptive Repression.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58 (2): 254–79.
Earl, Jennifer. 2003. “Tanks, Tear Gas, and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression.” Sociological Theory 21 (1): 44–68.
Earl, Jennifer, Thomas V. Maher, and Jennifer Pan. 2022. “The Digital Repression of Social Movements, Protest, and Activism: A Synthetic Review.” Science Advances 8 (10): 1–15.
Gause, LaGina. 2022. “Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior Following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups.” British Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 259–79.
Klein, Graig R., and Patrick M. Regan. 2018. “Dynamics of Political Protests.” International Organization 72 (2): 485–521. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000061.
Lehmann, Todd C., and Scott A. Tyson. 2022. “Sowing the Seeds: Radicalization as a Political Tool.” American Journal of Political Science 66 (2): 485–500. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12602.
Lohmann, Suzanne. 1993. “A Signaling Model of Informative and Manipulative Political Action.” American Political Science Review 87 (2): 319–33.
Lorentzen, Peter. 2013. “Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8 (2): 127–58.
O’Brien, Kevin J., and Lianjiang Li. 2006. Rightful Resistance in Rural China. Cambridge University Press.
Pierskalla, Jan Henryk. 2010. “Protest, Deterrence, and Escalation: The Strategic Calculus of Government Repression.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54 (1): 117–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002709352462.
Ritter, Emily Hencken. 2014. “Policy Disputes, Political Survival, and the Onset and Severity of State Repression.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58 (1): 143–68.
Ritter, Emily Hencken, and Courtenay R. Conrad. 2016. “Preventing and Responding to Dissent: The Observational Challenges of Explaining Strategic Repression.” American Political Science Review 110 (1): 85–99.
Shadmehr, Mehdi, and Dan Bernhardt. 2011. “Collective Action with Uncertain Payoffs: Coordination, Public Signals, and Punishment Dilemmas.” American Political Science Review 105 (4): 829–51.
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What is new about digital repression? This is what I have been asked frequently ever since presenting the first findings of my research on digital threats against exiled activists from authoritarian countries. Prompting further reflection on this question, Jennifer Earl, Thomas V. Maher and Jennifer Pan, in their synthetic review, organize the different strands of scholarship on the repressive use of digital tools and connect them to research on more traditional forms of repression.
In their distinction of different perpetrators, the authors accurately highlight the need to focus on private actors. Their role certainly cannot be underestimated given the outstanding share of companies, mercenaries, trolls and even automated bots in the distortion of online debates and silencing of critical voices. The surveillance industry, in particular, enables illiberal powerholders across the globe to surreptitiously infiltrate the most secured devices of their opponents. And some companies even strike back against those trying to bring public scrutiny into their opaque business transactions.
What I find exceptional about digital repression, however, are its spatial reach and intense effects on targets. Digital technologies have given repressive regimes new capacities to extend their domestic political controls across distances and borders. Transnational repression by authoritarian regimes certainly existed before, as the murder of Leon Trotsky by Soviet agents in Mexico shows. But digital tools allow for monitoring, suppressing and punishing political activity abroad on a much larger scale. With the help of surveillance and other digital threats, regime agents reach far into foreign territory, invading the lives of targeted exiles wherever they are.
These spatial dynamics of digital repression are even more complex when monitoring and surveillance are coupled with threats against exiles’ loved-ones in the home country. In our recent paper, Dana Moss, Gillian Kennedy and I show how ‘proxy punishment’ combines the collection of open-source intelligence with the age-old method of collective retribution. Once agents discover an activist’s media interview or social media campaign, they go about harassing her parents. In highly repressive contexts like Syria or Iran, a simple visit for ‘a cup of tea’ will send a strong signal. Chinese agents have even called diaspora members via WhatsApp and Skype from their parents’ homes as a means of intimidation. Proxy punishment (or ‘coercion by proxy’) comes in different forms that range in severity from physical violence and incarceration to travel bans and verbal threats. It keeps coercion, overt and covert, within the territorial borders of the regime to target those who remain out of reach.
Even more so than traditional methods, digital repression works along people’s social relations. Hacking attacks rarely target one individual alone but rather use the ties among activists to unravel entire groups and networks. Access to the confidential information of one person allows attackers to uncover new links and contacts, and to swiftly expand their efforts. Perpetrators try to infiltrate the accounts of low-profile activists and inexperienced users in order to reach more valuable targets. In transnational activist networks which span across multiple countries and communities, held together by digital communication, a successful attack against the weakest link could lead to severe consequences for all involved. Social ties – an essential resource for activists and movements – are turned into a vulnerability as the practices of digital repression spread uncertainty, mistrust and fear.
Because digital communication occupies such a central place in people’s lives and they maintain such intimate relationships with their devices, the effects of digital repression are immediate, disturbing and often very personal. The victims of social media harassment, intrusive hacking or the leaking of private information report of mental stress, paranoia and social isolation. When investigating the consequences of digital repression, therefore, research needs to pay more attention to its psychosocial impacts. Potential targets’ uncertainty about ongoing surveillance operations and the actual technical capabilities of adversaries or their doubts about how to securely communicate may increase feelings of exhaustion, helplessness and disengagement. ‘Emotional attrition’ plays an important role in the functioning of repression and the ways those exposed to it perceive their risks and opportunities.
My work evidently focuses on well-entrenched authoritarian regimes: the ‘usual suspects’ behind repression. Yet, as scholarship on extraterritorial authoritarian rule has shown, these regimes do not sit isolated in their walled-off territories. Enabled by private platforms, companies and other non-state actors, the authoritarian silencing across borders has developed in par with the commodification of capabilities for surveillance, data gathering and influence operations. It is also closely entangled with the security practices of Western democracies that heavily rely on digital technologies for their migration regimes or anti-terror policies, among others.
Consequently, I concur with the authors’ suggestion to widen our gaze in order to capture the full scope of digital repression and information controls, including in democracies. But even if “democracies engage in almost all forms of digital repression too”, the political effects of their actions might differ. When police in the United States or Europe shut down local networks or preemptively monitor key activists to suppress protests, their actions most certainly curtail the fundamental rights of the targeted individuals. But are they also authoritarian?
Here, Marlies Glasius’ distinction between illiberal and authoritarian practices provides helpful orientation. Whereas illiberal practices infringe on the autonomy and dignity of the person, authoritarian practices sabotage accountability “by means of secrecy, disinformation and disabling voice” (p. 517). The first are a human rights problem, the latter a threat to democracy. Applying her concept to the digital sphere, we argued that the data collection under the NSA surveillance program constituted primarily an illiberal practice as it violated the privacy of individuals on a massive scale. However, the US government’s patterned secrecy and misinformation on the remits of the program could actually be seen an authoritarian practice because they undermined accountability by blocking the information flow from powerholders to the people. The two types of practices then overlapped in the attempts to interfere in the reporting on the Snowden files, violating the journalists’ individual right to freedom of expression (illiberal) while disabling the public to ask critical questions (authoritarian).
Distinguishing the not only the methods and actors involved, but also the type of harm caused by digital repression seems particularly important in a time of tremendous unease about the ways in which digital technologies are used to control and manipulate speech and behavior. Scholars of repression have an important role to play in dissecting rights violations and threats to democratic politics.
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Earl, Maher, and Pan’s recent article (2022), “The Digital Repression of Social Movements, Protest, and Activism: a synthetic review,” captures digital repression across states and presents invaluable conceptualizations of difficult concepts and clear typologies. The article illuminates many threads that need further development and study. Among them are the role of private industry in digital repression, along with the tie between cybersecurity laws in non-democratic contexts and the struggle over questions of international cybersecurity norms and international internet governance.
The Role of Private Industry
Often market access and corporate profit are framed as the singular cause of the behavior of the major social media platforms in foreign markets. Certainly, these are major components to company behavior vis-à-vis governments, including repressive governments. But, companies, particularly those from democratic contexts, do not always side with governments—even when it may hurt profits. Company rhetoric and behavior often illustrates some commitment to a sense of liberal values. It would be wrong to overstate this commitment, but it should be considered as a complicating element in understanding companies’ behavior.
As Earl, Maher, and Pan note, companies based in the United States operate all over the world and, therefore, have become deeply embedded in not only social life but dissent in many places. These platforms exist within particular legal contexts, but they come out of a specific cultural framework of speech protection. As Earl (2012) also points out, although protesters’ speech and assembly are legally protected in some types of public spaces in the United States, because major social media platforms are privately owned, the online space they create and support is not public space. While platforms located in the United States are themselves protected under the First Amendment, the people using them are operating within a private space. But, in spite of this, companies expend great amounts of energy in communicating care for freedom of expression to consumers and governments. The work around freedom of expression may only be instrumental, but it also appears to impact some company decisions around content moderation.
Born within a US context, these international companies find themselves in a position to adjudicate between government definitions of appropriate content and activist work to hold governments accountable—while also trying to maintain their access to markets. It is true that the desire to maintain access to markets means these companies actively and passively collaborate with governments to address government repression goals, as Earl, Maher, and Pan illustrate. However, companies do not always side with government. Instead, they engage in a range of negotiations between government desire, company profits, and sometimes a protection of dissent that appears to line up with an attempt to do what is “right” in a conflict between government and citizens. More research is needed to address the causal mechanisms that appear to stretch beyond a focus on market conditions for platform behavior. For instance, in forthcoming work Trung-Anh Nguyen unpacks the ways in which a non-democratic regime such as the Vietnamese government can circumvent the space that platforms like Facebook may create for dissent when they use companies’ content moderation policies and other types of pressure outside of platforms. In 2020, for example, the Vietnamese government requested that Facebook block anti-government materials on the site. Facebook did not comply. In response, the Vietnamese government had internet service providers throttle Facebook until Facebook conceded to its demands. In contrast, following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Facebook moved quickly to reduce the distribution of military and affiliated authored materials, removed the ability for government actors to send content removal requests via channels the company has created for governments, and said the company was protecting political speech.
A cultural foundation in liberal speech values may be one input into company decisions that have lasting repercussions for activists. Other sets of assumptions may matter as well, such as criticism that Facebook has tended to view state-society relations through a US or democracy-centric lens without any deep expertise in other contexts. The blind spots can have deep and terrible consequences, as the UN found when it argued that Facebook played a “determining role” in the violence against the Rohingya in 2017.
Cybersecurity Laws & International Internet Governance
Non-democratic countries, such as China, Vietnam, and Myanmar, increasingly include online dissent as part of their cybersecurity laws, under terms such disruption to social stability or unity. This type of cybersecurity law usually requires data to be stored within the country’s borders and assures government access to the data. These policies concern companies, proponents of a free and open internet, and activists, alike. And, their proliferation is tied to an argument at the international level about international cybersecurity norms and international internet governance, which focuses on whether decisions about the international internet and its uses should be made solely by governments or by multiple stakeholders that include governments.
In early 2022, China and Russia issued a Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development. The statement covered a range of topics but included material about information and communication technology. It asserted, among other things, that “the sides…believe that any attempts to limit their sovereign right to regulate national segments of the Internet and ensure their security are unacceptable.” This focus on sovereignty is mirrored in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s 2015 International Code of Conduct for Information Security, which was submitted to the UN General Assembly (A/69/723).
In contrast, the US led Declaration for the Future of the Internet asserts that:
Over the last year, the United States has worked with partners from all over the world – including civil society, industry, academia, and other stakeholders to reaffirm the vision of an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet and reverse negative trends in this regard. Under this vision, people everywhere will benefit from an Internet that is unified unfragmented; facilitates global communications and commerce; and supports freedom, innovation, education and trust.
These debates are occurring within a context of continuing global inequality in international internet infrastructure and internet governance—as the work of scholars such as Fernanda Rosa highlight.
Earl, Maher, and Pan rightfully point out that governance is different from repression in that repression is “designed to prevent, reduce, and/or control noninstitutional challenges (e.g., protest, social movements, and activism) and is distinct from broader carceral systems that govern many kinds of activity.” However, these debates generate the underlying opportunity structures for both digital repression and information and communication technologies as pathways for dissent. The international debates focused on forming international cybersecurity norms and the future state of international internet governance – including the questions of whether current ideals of a single, open international internet should remain (or be) the aspiration of the international community—are going to deeply impact the future of dissent inside countries. The work of those who focus on these spheres should be included in conversations about digital repression.
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Global norms are shifting as governments demonstrate an increased willingness to exert control over platforms. This generally represents a troubling development; states are aggressively pressing for content takedowns, pushing platforms to provide access to user data, enacting enhanced surveillance, and filtering content. But there are some auspicious signs as well. In Europe, for example, regulators are nearing passage of the Digital Services Act (DSA) to rein in big internet tech companies and allow for greater user control and privacy. This essay highlights three specific areas of contestation. First, trends of internet fragmentation are expanding quickly – in both authoritarian states and democratic countries – challenging global norms and human rights principles. Second, regulatory action stemming from Europe may offset certain harms, particularly in relation to platforms, but the consequences remain unclear. Third, platforms exist in a complicated landscape. They are facing increased pressure from governments to control how they operate, yet they remain deeply reluctant to reform.
Pressure against internet platforms increases – the splinternet grows
On April 28, the U.S. government launched a “declaration for the future of the internet.” The document reaffirmed the importance of ensuring an internet that is “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure” and the need to protect online human rights across the digital ecosystem. Sixty countries joined the United States in pledging to uphold these principles (although the number later dropped to 59 after Kenya stated that it had been erroneously included). The initial group of signatories conspicuously lacked several important stakeholders, including India, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa. Certain regions were under-represented. The Middle East included just one signatory – Israel. Africa included only two signatories: Niger and Cabo Verde.
A central motivation underlying the Declaration is the belief that splinternet trends are largely confined to autocratic governments and that they are reversible. In a background press call for the Declaration, a senior White House official observed, “I think the reality is that what we’re seeing as we look out over the world is a, you know, trend by some countries, and particularly some of the authoritarian countries, to try to create a splinternet.” But they noted that “galvanizing the world behind a shared vision is a very important part of pushing back on these splinternet tendencies.”
In reality, the splinternet ship has already sailed – and it is not limited to autocratic countries. Consider the manifold legal enactments implemented in erstwhile democracies like India, Turkey, and Indonesia to restrict how internet platforms operate. In India, for example, the new Information Technology Rules require firms to deploy AI-based moderation tools, open in-country offices, appoint local officers, and comply with takedown orders from a court, government agency, or “any other competent authority” within 36 hours. Failure to comply can lead to prison sentences of up to seven years. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the potential for abuse. All told, Freedom on the Net documented in its latest report at least 24 countries which have “passed or announced new laws or rules governing how platforms treat content.” In this present moment, the question is not whether the splinternet trend will persist; rather, is there any possibility of slowing down accelerating patterns of internet fragmentation?
Liberal democracies (in Europe) demand a say
On a more positive note – despite incessant foot-dragging from the United States – European regulators have moved steadily forward to reshape how internet platforms operate. In the next couple years, the Digital Services Act, along with the Digital Markets Act, will come into force and profoundly affect how social media platforms handle user content and how they engage in market competition. Initial signs are encouraging, but it’s hard to know exactly how these rules will work in practice – and what their effect will be. Several areas bear particular attention. First, how EU regulators will actually implement the new rules remains unclear. We know that platforms will face heightened obligations to respond to government regulations to remove content or disclose user data, to publish transparency reports, and to build mechanisms for users to notify platforms about prohibited content, such as the presence of illegal hate speech. We also know that the DSA mandates additional requirements for “Very Large Online Platforms” or VLOPs. These enhanced requirements include undertaking formal risk assessments, interfacing regularly with regulators regarding platform practices and policies, and appointing special compliance officers accountable for policy changes. Translating high-level legal enactments into everyday operations will not be easy – and there is a lot of room for error along the way. This leads to a second area of concern: to what extent will other countries exploit the DSA to strengthen their sovereign authority over internet platforms, largely for censorship and political control? As we have seen with Germany’s NetzDG law, a regulation intended to counter online hate speech, autocratic regimes have used it as a template to crackdown on free speech. There is a very real risk that the DSA could similarly serve as a vessel for aspiring autocrats to suppress online communications.
The European regulatory push also raises an uncomfortable question: is the EU practicing a form of “digital colonialism” by imposing their own rules and standards on tech companies without soliciting input from governments or citizens in the Global South? It is one thing, if EU rules exclusively impact users in its bloc. But the reality is that the DSA will transform how platforms operate globally. The law will define new protections, obligations, and standards for platforms. Citizens in the Global South will be forced to live with the final decisions of European regulators, despite having had little ability to influence these rules along the way.
Internet platforms face a complicated landscape
Internet platforms occupy an increasingly problematic space. On the one hand, there is little question that internet companies face increasing pressure from governments to take down content, hand over user data, and conform to an assorted list of demands (exemplifying the splinternet trend). Freedom House notes that at least 48 countries have passed new rules for tech companies designed to “subdue free expression and gain greater access to private data.” On the other hand, real questions have emerged about how much internet platforms actually care about or prioritize the needs of citizens, outside of core U.S. and European markets. There is growing recognition that big internet platforms, such as Facebook, dedicate scant resources to countering disinformation or political manipulation in Global South markets. Whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Sophie Zhang paint a damning picture about how a combination of corporate neglect, underinvestment, and disinterest has allowed hate speech and violent rhetoric to flourish around the globe, from Ethiopia and India, to the Philippines, Israel, and Palestine (Haugen states bluntly that a major reason why she leaked Facebook’s secrets is “because I think the global South is in danger.”).
Of course, tech companies could shift course and decide to work collaboratively with democratic stakeholders – across the world – to voluntarily improve policies on algorithmic transparency, user harm mitigation, or reducing the polarizing effect of misinformation and disinformation. Yet so far, few companies have shown interest in undertaking such efforts. Rather, companies have clung to a “profits over safety” business model and implemented limited changes, and only when compelled by scandals or other outrages.
Findings from the 2022 annual Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) report illustrate this pattern of behavior. The report evaluated 14 of the world’s leading tech companies, such as Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Alibaba, using over 300 factors, from advertising transparency to responsiveness to human rights due diligence. RDR concluded that none of the 14 firms received a passing grade when it came to aligning their policies and practices with human rights obligations under the UN Guiding Principles. It noted: “companies are content to conduct business as usual when the state of the world demands anything but.” This might be an acceptable outcome if the status quo wasn’t so alarming. But given the widespread problems facing the industry and the growing consensus that platforms’ mode of doing business is eroding democratic governance, polluting information environments, and undermining human rights, tech companies’ reluctance to undertake meaningful reforms is troubling. To add insult to injury, the top ranked company in RDR’s index, Twitter, is facing a change in leadership that will potentially place Elon Musk at the helm of the company. If his present statements – such as calling for less content moderation or restoring “free speech” to the platform – are any indication of future action, then we can expect much greater turbulence ahead.
Conclusion
Platforms face turbulent waters ahead. This is partially a result of their own missteps and unforced errors which have galvanized regulators (at least in Europe) to take decisive steps to change how Big Tech does business. But platforms also find themselves subject to increasingly assertive governments, many with authoritarian characteristics, who are seizing opportunities to curb online speech, subdue political discourse, and exert greater control over citizen communication. Undergirding these issues are larger questions about the future viability of so-called “Web 2.0” applications. Given the pathologies facing these platforms, many citizens are exploring the democratic possibilities of Web 3.0 decentralized platforms. While it is too early to predict which Web 3.0 services or applications will take root, it is clear that mounting user discontent with Big Tech’s surveillance capitalism model is energizing new movements for change.
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Over the past few decades, the combination of economic and political liberalization in many areas of the developing world has promoted the emergence of various forms of collective organizing. This dynamic has been particularly pronounced in Latin America, where drastic neoliberal reforms coincided with an unprecedented period of democratic expansion. One of the most visible examples took place in Argentina, where rising unemployment in the 1990s led community leaders to organize laid-off workers in poor neighborhoods across the nation. Despite their diverse origins, these groups rapidly developed similar repertoires that helped them recruit members and gain influence, giving birth to what came to be known as the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, or piqueteros (Spanish for “roadblockers”). Since their emergence, these organizations have functioned as networks of local groups that use demonstrations to demand the distribution of social assistance, usually in the form of foodstuffs and positions in workfare programs. If successful, they allocate part of these resources among participants and use the rest to develop an extensive array of social services in underprivileged areas.
The trajectories of rank and file activists in this movement pose an intriguing puzzle. Most of them joined, in the words of many an informant, “due to necessity”: they were in dire need of resources and an acquaintance told them about a group that was “signing people up” for a social program. The vast majority initially held negative views of the piqueteros and had limited experience in politics. Once recruited, they started to attend demonstrations and other activities, receiving foodstuffs regularly, until they obtained a state-funded workfare plan. Since organizations usually administer these positions directly, respondents are expected to sustain their involvement in order to continue receiving benefits. Given these circumstances, we would expect most of them to participate for as long as they acquire resources and to withdraw when more effective sources of income become available. However, the subsequent behavior of many of them challenges these expectations, as they begin to make efforts to remain involved, prioritizing activism over family time, leisure activities, and even financial self-interest. The puzzle is more intriguing in that several of these committed participants remain openly indifferent or even antagonistic to central aspects of the movement’s agenda. What processes, then, lead to this level of attachment?
In my research, I found that the key to that question lies in the interaction between the personal histories of activists and their experiences while mobilized. Using interviews and participant observation, I discovered that for some of my respondents, involvement in a piquetero organization offers an opportunity to engage in practices associated with an idealized blue-collar lifestyle threatened by long-term socioeconomic decline. Through their daily routines in the movement, older participants reconstruct the routines they associate with a golden past in which factory jobs were plentiful, younger activists develop the kind of habits they were raised to see as valuable, and all members protect aspects of communal life undermined by the expansion of poverty. Everyday activities in the movement provide a reassuring sense of consistency and respectability, which makes continued engagement deeply appealing to some.
These findings have important implications for our field. In recent years, research on activism has expanded in exciting directions. Scholars have explored the complex role that culture, emotions and identity play in collective action, directed our attention to the diversity of trajectories along the life course of activists, and corrected much of the literature’s excessive focus on the early stages of participation. Cases like the piqueteros have a lot to contribute to this debate by illuminating how the intricate relation between people’s backgrounds and their experiences in a movement generates dispositions which in turn affect their post-recruitment trajectories. In particular, the analysis of why some individuals develop a strong attachment to their organizations (while others in a similar situation do not) suggests four interrelated lessons.
First, we need to pay further attention to the role of practices in the sustainment (or not) of activism. The positive resonance between an individual’s beliefs and his or her routines while mobilized might be as important for long-term participation as the alignment of such beliefs with the official platform of an organization. Literature on social movements has tended to conceptualize long-term activism mostly as the outcome of ideological conversion. However, the development of political commitment does not necessarily require that a person fully agree with his or her organization’s views.
Second, if mobilization becomes enjoyable due to its resonance with the backgrounds of activists, then our models of collective action must assign to their experiences outside of the movement the same explanatory value as those inside it. Participants rarely see activism as separate from other life spheres, thus we should be careful not to compartmentalize in theory domains that are united in the actual lives of individuals.
Third, since the mechanisms that influence people’s attachment to collective action are also present in other instances of collective life, it is imperative to expand our toolkits by borrowing concepts and insight from outside the limits of our field. The capacity of new frameworks to explain contentious events worldwide depends on our willingness to engage in broader debates and learn from parallels between contentious politics and other social activities.
Fourth, social movement theory should be careful not to overestimate the importance of extraordinary events for mobilization. While collective action can break with people’s customs and expose them to new lifestyles, its appeal can also lie in its established and everyday aspects. Given that the disruption of quotidian life can be an effective motivator for protest, we need to remember that both divergence and conformity with convention can promote activism.
What is most important, it is crucial to keep in mind that the desire among the rank-and-file to protect traditional ways of life does not necessarily preclude a movement from pursuing inclusive agendas. The relation between individual viewpoints and organizational goals is complex, meaning that the demands of members can be effectively addressed in multiple ways. In the case of the piqueteros, for instance, adherence to old-style notions of labor, family, and community has led to support for redistributive policies such as state-funded cooperatives, universal pensions, and guaranteed basic income for mothers and children.
This last point carries much significance given current events worldwide. Studying the piqueteros, along with similar instances in other countries, can contribute much to our understanding of the political consequences of working-class decline. The fact that some individuals affected by deindustrialization responded to the undermining of their traditional forms of life by engaging in progressive mobilization suggests that contrary to what many observers argue, the link between economic upheaval, social anxiety, and reactionary extremism is neither inevitable nor irreversible. At a time when political radicalization, rising inequality, and institutional backsliding highlight the fragility of democracy and inclusion worldwide, understanding the processes that influence grassroots activism among those most affected by global neoliberalism becomes essential.
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Mobilizing Ideas is introducing an exciting change in the way that we will be providing content. Although we will continue featuring essays written by social movement scholars on various themes, we will be focusing more of our attention on developing and sharing videos featuring a broad range of social movement scholars. This is an ideal way to allow our viewers to get to know scholars in the field and their work. Videos will provide scholars with opportunities to talk about their ongoing work, but also to provide insightful commentary on contemporary issues that are of interest to activists and social movement scholars.
Check out our second video featuring Naomi R Williams (Rutgers University) interviewed by Jaylexia Clark (Notre Dame). Stay tuned for more exciting videos in the months ahead.
If you are interested in the full version of this interview, please check our youtube account. This is the second video of our interview project, check out the first one from last month.
Current Editors in Chief,
Rory McVeigh, Chang Liu and Natalie Bourman-Karns
mobilizingideas
Mobilizing Ideas is introducing an exciting change in the way that we will be providing content. Although we will continue featuring essays written by social movement scholars on various themes, we will be focusing more of our attention on developing and sharing videos featuring a broad range of social movement scholars. This is an ideal way to allow our viewers to get to know scholars in the field and their work. Videos will provide scholars with opportunities to talk about their ongoing work, but also to provide insightful commentary on contemporary issues that are of interest to activists and social movement scholars.
Check out our first video featuring Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick (University of San Diego) interviewed by Emmanuel Cannady (Notre Dame). Stay tuned for more exciting videos in the months ahead.
Current Editors in Chief,
Rory McVeigh, Chang Liu and Natalie Bourman-Karns
Interview Timeline:
00:50 – Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s research agenda
05:30 – Advice for younger scholars
09:15 – Unique role at University of San Diego
mobilizingideas
This article was originally published on the Great Transition Initiative as part of the Forum “An Earth Constitution: Has Its Time Come?”
Does the process of constitution-making matter more than the particularities of constitutional design? Recently published research by a growing range of social scientists and legal scholars indicates yes. For instance, in their book Constituents Before Assembly, Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi provide their findings from a sweeping empirical analysis of the effects of popular participation in constitutionalization.1 The takeaway? As noted in my Law & Society Review review, “participatory constitution-making…has a lasting and systematic effect on subsequent democratization.”2
My own doctoral research built on the works of Maboudi and his colleagues, as well as sundry others, and asked about the role of democracy movements in making constitutions. A comparative analysis of the eleven top-30 GDP countries that underwent formal constitutionalization processes between 1974 and 2001 showed that the strategies of democracy movements in relation to constitutional openings were significantly determinative of subsequent democratization. In cases where such movements engaged in a revolutionary constitutional practice (mass engagement in deliberative constitutionalism from below, producing clearly articulated constitutional programs as in Brazil, Canada, Poland, South Africa, and Spain), both textual and substantive democratization followed. In cases where democracy movements failed to practice revolutionary constitutionalism (Australia, China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey), the outcomes ranged from middling to disastrous.
Of course, these stories are complex. But the argument involves, in part, the ideas expressed in this excerpt:
“A social movement can be defined as a collective application of human energies through the medium of society for the purpose of agitating and reconfiguring social relations toward common goals. Thus, a social movement is a wave. There is significant variation among different movement forms in their scope and intensity. When constitutional movements arise, they assemble broad coalitions out of diverse sectors of society. As a result, if successful, their effects extend far beyond formal law.”
What does this mean for the idea of an Earth Constitution? Among other things, it suggests that approaches to global constitutional change that center the state, government, governance, nations, and existing global institutions are misguided. Yes, we should consider plural approaches to constitutional change. And the structures through which movements move matter; they condition possibilities. But regardless of the particular terrains on which global constitutionalization moves forward, it is the deliberative mobilization of millions of peoples that ultimately is vital to success.
By centering the movement-building process—in this case, the question of how a global constitutional movement builds itself through plural yet concerted democratic engagements—we transcend the historical failures of elite constitutional design and build the strategic capacity to mobilize the necessary resources in sufficient time to reconstruct our global political economy, avoiding the worst possible climate futures. The emerging technological revolutions of this period make possible decentralized coordination on a global scale. The prefigurative constitutionalisms of earlier efforts such as the Constitution for the Federation of Earth as well as the more recent Encuentros, Cochabamba, Occupy, Movement for Black Lives, solidarity economy, climate strike, and Social Forum processes, among others, make a global constitutional transition from below that much more likely.
The question that matters most is not whether an Earth Constitution is a good or necessary idea. It is also not what we, ourselves, believe the design of such a constitution should be. The question we must take up is that of how to engage hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings in a mass constitution-making process from below.
1. Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi, Constituents Before Assembly: Participation, Deliberation, and Representation in the Crafting of New Constitutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2. Ben Manski, review of Constituents Before Assembly: Participation, Deliberation, and Representation in the Crafting of New Constitutions, by Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi, Law & Society Review 52, no. 4 (2018): 1111–1116.
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