Perceived Popularity and Online Political Dissent: Evidence from Twitter in Venezuela

Abstract

On October 31, 2013, thousands of Twitter accounts, automated to actively retweet President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, were unexpectedly closed by the social media platform. I exploit this event to study the relationship between perceived popularity on social media (amplified through the use of bot accounts) and online political expression. The analysis uses more than two hundred thousand tweets spanning six months around the event and employs a quasi-experimental empirical framework. Following the closure of the accounts, the volume of tweets mentioning the president increased by an estimated 33 percent, with a differential increase for critical messages. Relative to tweets by government leaders, the number of likes for tweets by opposition leaders increased by an estimated 21 percent. Consistent with the presence of a spiral of silence in online political expression, the results suggest that the change in the perceived popularity of Maduro led to an increase in users’ willingness to express both criticism of the president and support for the opposition. While previous studies have documented how autocratic governments engage in manipulative online campaigns, this paper provides evidence of their effectiveness and highlights an important mechanism through which they can influence behavior.

Bot, or not? Comparing three methods for detecting social bots in five political discourses

“…It is still to be examined to what extent the simulation's results by Ross et al (2019) can be transferred to real Twitter networks. Morales (2020) suggests a similar effect using a quasi-experimental design. After Twitter had deleted more than 6000 automated accounts that retweeted Venezuela's then-President Maduro in 2013, he shows that Twitter users’ willingness to express criticism of the president as well as support for the opposition significantly increased.…”

Hot topics: Denial-of-Service attacks on news websites in autocracies

“…Whereas the ability of authoritarian governments to control information has been often limited by their borders in the past, modern-day authoritarian regimes can use cyberattacks and other digital means to globally censor and suppress opposition voices. While my study gives some hope that DoS attacks are not as widely used for this purpose, authoritarian regimes rely increasingly on a combination of different tools including DoS attacks, website filters, and social media flooding to control their online spheres (e.g., King et al, 2013;Munger et al, 2018;Roberts, 2018;Sanovich et al, 2018;Morales, 2019).…”

“…As a response, most media outlets have migrated to the Internet, making news websites of particular importance for Venezuelan citizens to retrieve independent news (Cardenas, 2017). The regime has reacted to this by setting up pro-government websites, uses social media as a distraction (Munger et al, 2018), and has its own pro-government online agitators (Morales, 2019). Moreover, government-owned Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have begun to filter some websites in recent years and news and other websites are increasingly hit with DoS and other technical attacks (Freedom House, 2017b;OONI, 2018;La Patilla, 2018b;Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2019).…”

Social Media Use and Participation in Dueling Protests: The Case of the 2016–2017 Presidential Corruption Scandal in South Korea

“…However, SNS platforms may make preference falsification (Kuran 1997) harder to maintain by facilitating more open communication among such protesters. These platforms allow citizens to express their views more freely online without fear of being isolated (Ho and McLeod 2008;Morales 2020;Zerback and Fawzi 2017). Thus, SNS users' perception of the social costs of revealing their true beliefs regarding the Park scandal was likely lower because they associated primarily with other like-minded users.…”