When authoritarian regimes are faced with increasing protests and unrest within their domestic populations the blocking and throttling of a nation’s Internet is an all too common occurrence. Recent days have seen a bevy of reports that the Belarusian government of Alexander Lukashenko, having engaged in suspected election manipulations on a massive scale, is now using its power over local Internet Service Providers and domestic networked infrastructures to shut and slow down the means of by which citizens mobilize in mass against their governments. The problem is such that domestic human and democracy rights activists are increasingly impeded in their efforts to disseminate information on the situation within the country.
Do Internet throttling and shutdowns really impede democratic mobilization? Based on our research there are strong indicators that social media facilitates mass mobilization and leads to substantial increases in protestor turnout in physical spaces. We found that access to social media for mobilization plays two important roles for the development and sustainment of protest mobilization. First, we found that online engagement facilitated global awareness and elevated international support for protest demands. While this claim is anecdotally supported by protest movements ranging from the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution and the multiple revolutions that swept the Middle East during the Arab Spring, through statistical analysis we were able to demonstrate that during the 2013-14 Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, online social media activity led, with a slight delay, to substantially increased international coverage on social media related to the protest movement. Second, we found that online social media posting led to substantially higher physical mobilization turnout in support of the revolution.
While our findings directly assess the relationship of social media and physical protest mobilization, another study by Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E Roberts in 2013 demonstrated how states use various mechanisms, such as content removal and censoring to effectively silence collective expression. But that authoritarian regimes, like China, can use online dissent to assess citizen needs. The Internet and its associated technologies are a core technical means for resource mobilization. Dictators are loathe the allow mobilization in times of crisis and use every means at their disposal to stifle citizen mobilization. It is no surprise that repressive regimes in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and multiple Middle Eastern states filter, censor, block, or generally impede the functioning of the Internet.
When attempting to safeguard a regime - technologies that facilitate mobilization are threatening. This conclusion was clear during Secretary of State Clinton’s Tenure, when the U.S. placed a great deal of emphasis on Internet Freedom. During Clinton’s tenure funding for Internet Freedom related initiatives rose to about $30 million/year. A RAND report on the impact of Internet freedom initiatives stated:
“There are clear indications that Internet freedom has a positive, but indirect, connection to enlarging political space within repressive regimes.”
As state domestic intelligence and security services have improved, traditional physical mobilization has become increasingly difficult. In truth, physical mobilization itself is difficult as technologies and laws have increased the repressive and surveillance capacities of states at a marginal cost. In 2014, Ukrainian’s protesting on the streets in Maidan received SMS messages on their phones indicated that they were “participants of a mass disturbance.” The state did not need to arrest these individuals at the time, because, by law all Ukrainians are required to register their sim cards in their mobile phones. Additionally, many of these phones are traceable back to credit cards with home addresses. Yet it was the collective mass, organized in part through social media that lowered the individual costs of protesting. By creating larger, more diverse protests, individuals were less likely to be individually targeted by the state and were therefore more likely to mobilize.
Social media is not a magic bullet and does not turn a repressive regime into a representative one. Evgeny Morozov has made this point very clear in multiple works. But it is a tool that can empower and elevate the voices of the oppressed and enable mobilization. Blocking and throttling the Internet in Belarus is not a sign of regime strength, but rather of regime weakness. It highlights Alexander Lukashenko and his regime’s fear of its people and their ability to mobilize for free and fair elections.
Below are some resources for citizens to use to remain more secure (security is relative) while engaged online.
Security Planner by the Citizen Lab
https://securityplanner.org/#/
Tails Boum – Portable operating system to protect privacy and avoid censorship
The Tor Project - Tor Browser isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you.
The Guardian Project - Guardian Project creates easy to use secure apps, open-source software libraries, and customized solutions that can be used around the world by any person looking to protect their communications and personal data from unjust intrusion, interception and monitoring.
Security in-a-box - The Tactics Guides in this toolkit cover basic principles, including advice on how to use social media and mobile phones more safely.
https://securityinabox.org/en/
Tactical Tech - Works with an international audience of engaged citizens and civil society actors to investigate and mitigate the evolving impact of technologies on society.