Cross-posted at GWU’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.

Last week, I trekked northwest to Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy for an event on The Internet, Free Expression, and Authoritarianism.

Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, discussed the ways in which authoritarian governments benefit from the Internet (check out Morozov’s TED speech to watch him outline some of his points). Morozov argues that totalitarian governments appear to be using the Internet in three ways to protect their own interests.

Morozov’s first point is that authoritarian regimes can use the Internet to spread propaganda and the state’s perspective. They can also attack personalities instead of spending time censoring and/or arresting people. “Just because the space is decentralized, it doesn’t mean that it’s hard to manipulate,” said Morozov. Some of his examples include:

  • China’s 50 Cent Party, whose members join interesting conversations online and steer them in more patriotic directions for the the government.
  • Russia’s School of Bloggers, which enlists the young and technologically savvy in the government’s efforts to translate its ideology into language that appeals to other young, technologically savvy people.
  • Iran’s Bureau for the Development of Religious Weblogs trains clerics to blog in an effort to counter more progressive voices online.

Developing tools that encourage citizens to deliberate online is another way that authoritarian states can use the Internet to increase their legitimacy. “It’s hard to find a case where governments don’t want to be tech savvy,” said Morozov. “Even Burma is building a Silicon Valley.”

These kinds of tools, many of which encourage the public to comment on policy ideas, can help the government generate truly useful information, such as how to improve technological infrastructure, for example. However, they can also be used to share the blame for failed policies and engage in spin about unpopular policy decisions, warns Morozov.

Finally, argues Morozov the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool to monitor dissent and identify individual dissenters — all through information that we share freely with each other using social networking tools and websites.

“The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control,” said Morozov. Or, as he put it in his TED speech, governments used to torture people for days to get the kind of information they now find online.

  • ACLU’s Facebook widget, “What do quizzes know about you?”
  • The study “8 Friends are Enough,” which uses social graph approximation of the eight friends shown in search engine listings of people on Facebook to suggest that it would only take 800 days of effort to create a social graph of everyone on Facebook.
  • MIT’s Project “Gaydar,” which uses information on Facebook to predict whether or not someone is gay.
  • A Wired.com Danger Room post about In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, buying stock in a firm that monitors social media, called Visible Technologies.
  • A tool being developed by the EU to scan CCTV images and the web looking for “abnormal” behavior.

CRAFTING BETTER RESEARCH

Later during the discussion, Shanthi Kalathil, the author of Open Networks, Closed Regimes opened a discussion about building better research methods to analyze activism and advocacy on the Internet:

“We’re still looking at this through the perspective of blocking and censorship. Our metrics of “free” vs. “not free” exert a phenomenon effect: we’re only understanding what’s going on through the one frame. What are we missing? We’re missing the parts of the web in these countries that are being used for the public sphere and good governance. We need to get beyond the metaphor of dissidents and governments because we miss a broad landscape of changes, including vibrancy, communalism, nationalism, and the changing nature of discourse online. . . We need more evidence-based studies, not anecdotal studies that correlate (or don’t) social media and political change.”

Marc Lynch, who teaches at George Washington University and blogs for Foreign Policy, continued the discussion. “We need to test claims about the impact of new media on behavior and attitudes,” said Lynch. “Where is the causal relationship?”

Lynch argues that our current data on social media and political change is anecdotal and evidence free. It’s drawn to where evidence exists, and not to where evidence is important. It doesn’t usually include counter-factual and cases of non-success with social media and political change. Further, it doesn’t usually look at the causal mechanism – what connects something on Facebook to an action?

“More doesn’t equal more impact. It can just equal more noise,” said Lynch.

Lynch suggested that academics focus their social media and activism research in several different levels of analysis:

  • The individual level, which looks at attitudes, competencies, and behaviors of activists and participants in activism online.
  • The level of collective action. Are different types of online activism actually bad forms of organization? Do they collapse under the weight of authoritarian governments?
  • The regime level. Is generating lots of Internet activity a net positive for democratic, citizen activism groups? Or does it allow the government to better monitor and counter different forms of activism?
  • The level of international attention. When the West pays attention to online citizen activism does it bring with it the attention of the aggressive regime?