Public opinion effects of digital state repression: How internet outages shape government evaluation in Africa

ABSTRACT

¹Internet shutdowns have become a popular instrument for repressive regimes to silence dissent in a digitized world. While authorities seek to suppress opponents by imposing Internet outages, we know little about how the public reacts to such incisive measures. The regime might face anger and resentment from the public as a response to Internet deprivation. Why do regimes still use Internet shutdowns when they do not only face economic but also societal losses? In this paper, I argue that Internet shutdowns lower the public’s evaluation of the political leadership as citizens blame the government for the service outages. For the analysis, I combine fine-grained data on Internet outages with survey data from the Afrobarometer and apply an “unexpected event during survey design.” Results show that citizens do not hold the government accountable for Internet disruptions, thus making Internet shutdowns a powerful tool for autocrats to silent dissent digitally.

KEYWORDS:

• Information technology
• repression
• Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This study was preregistered on July 5, 2021 at https://osf.io/d2ewx/. The three-way interaction term of the third hypothesis was added later. Additionally, the set of dependent variables was enlarged beyond the initial selection.

2. An exception is the case of Kenya, where I rely on the level of provinces.

3. A list of regional identifiers was provided by CAIDA upon request.

4. The two key assumptions to UESD, ignorability and excludability, are met. A detailed explanation can be found in the appendix (Section 2).

5. The number of individuals living in affected regions varies between these groups. While 953 individuals exposed to Internet outages are to be found within the group of one to 10 days after an outage, the number decreases to 450 and 187 respondents in 11 to 20 and 21 to 30 days, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project number 402127652.

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Strauch

Rebecca Strauch (PhD, University of Konstanz) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research focuses on digital adaptation in authoritarian states.