Episode 2.8: Online Dissent, Offline Repression, with Alexandra Siegel
Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression?
In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements.
Given its more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism presents dictators with a new challenge of social control. One possible response is to try to censor online dissent, though it takes a high level of technological sophistication and state capacity to shut down social media opposition completely. Another option is to use physical repression to deal with digital dissent: to throw anti-regime Twitter users in jail. So what happens when autocrats bring old coercive weapons to this new battleground?
This is the question we put to our guest, Dr. Alexandra Siegel, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Alex has been working for years on understanding how political conflict plays out in the online sphere, especially in non-democratic settings. The paper we discuss with Alex – an article, coauthored with Jennifer Pan, that appeared in the American Political Science Review – investigates what happens when the Saudi regime imprisons or tortures activists, religious leaders, and journalists for voicing critical views on social media. Does throwing online critics in jail actually silence them? Does it deter other activists? And how do their legions of online followers react?
This is a fascinating conversation about the limits to authoritarian coercive capacities in the information age. But it’s also a conversation about the exciting new world of social media-based research. Alex’s work is an elegant example of how scholars can use social-media data not just to capture expression and mobilization in the increasingly vibrant digital public square, but also to tap into mass political cognition more broadly – for instance, using search engine data to track the public’s interest in political events.
We also ask Alex to reflect on the perils that may lurk in this brave new world of text-as-data and social-media research. Does the sheer vastness of the available troves of data create new opportunities to fish for results – to dig up statistically significant patterns that aren’t actually substantively meaningful? Can we do anything to guard against this risk? And how should we think about the ethical implications of using publicly available data to study the targets of violent repression? How should scholars of online political behavior in autocracies strike a balance between principles of open science and the avoidance of harm to the activists they’re studying?
Works discussed in the episode:
Barrie, Christopher, and Alexandra A. Siegel. 2021. “Kingdom of Trolls? Influence Operations in the Saudi Twittersphere.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1: 1-41.
Chen, Jidong, Jennifer Pan, and Yiqing Xu. 2016. "Sources of authoritarian responsiveness: A field experiment in China." American Journal of Political Science 60(2): 383-400.
Grimmer, Justin, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart. 2022. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107(2): 1–18.
King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2014. "Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation." Science 345(6199): 1-10.
Moss, Dana M. 2020. “Voice After Exit: Explaining Diaspora Mobilization for the Arab Spring.” Social Forces 98(4): 1669–1694.
Pan, Jennifer, and Alexandra A. Siegel. 2020. “How Saudi Crackdowns Fail to Silence Online Dissent.” American Political Science Review 114(1): 109–25.
