Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies

Abstract

The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less.

Terrorism and internet censorship

“…We find consistent, compelling evidence that violent opposition induces states to censor digital content and reduce internet freedoms. Our data show that restricting digital content and internet freedom, in response to terrorism, is not simply a behavior performed by illiberal regimes like Turkey (Meserve & Pemstein, 2018;Gohdes, 2018). We find that even liberal democracies respond to terrorism and insurgency by tightening content restrictions through the use of legal mechanisms that force a variety of online content providers (OCPs) to censor content on their behalf, rather than relying on the direct infrastructure control and filtering techniques pioneered by countries like China.…”

“…Additionally, firms have limited resources to contest state pressure, often having little financial incentive to fight individual requests to take down content, and, because the process of censorship is off-loaded onto firms, censorship through private points of control exhibits less oversight than 'old-fashioned' censorship (Adler, 2011). OCP-based restrictions are therefore potentially attractive to democracies, as censorship can be codified in legal systems, can be offloaded financially to firms, and, especially in less liberal democracies, can be manipulated to effect political censorship that would not stand up to strict legal scrutiny (Adler, 2011;Marsden, 2011;Meserve & Pemstein, 2018). We provide robust, systematic evidence that democracies respond to violent opposition by censoring digital content, and do so specifically through private points of control.…”

“…We therefore make use of an alternative measure of this latent concept, based on an expert survey fielded by the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem). We use a question about government censorship effort (Coppedge et al, 2018;Pemstein et al, 2018) that asked roughly five experts (per observation) to rate country-years on the effort and success government officials have in blocking internet content. For the exact survey question wording, clarification information, and measurement decisions, see Online appendix section C.…”

“…While previous work explores associations between terrorism and digital content controls, measurement strategies and findings remain relatively limited, exploring a brief time frame and using a single measure of digital restriction, based on the products of a single company, Google LLC (Meserve & Pemstein, 2018).…”

The Pragmatic School of Thought in Open Science Practice: A Case Study of Multi-stakeholder Participation in Shaping the Future of Internet Governance

“…However, online censorship and digital surveillance are tools employed by governments which limit the collective action potential of open science [47]. Governments engage in surveillance and censorship for commercial reasons; for example, economies heavily invested in the knowledge-producing sectors will work to restrict citizens access to information to promote IP generation [48]. In an open letter on the 28th birthday of the worldwide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee highlighted the danger posed by companies and governments working together "watching our every move online, and passing extreme laws that trample on our rights to privacy" [49].…”