Walking Through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context

Abstract

The early hopes of the internet as a technology of “liberation” have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even the most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication experience of citizens. Yet, the scholarship examining the underlying motivations and what influences individuals to employ censorship circumvention technologies (CCTs) in authoritarian contexts remains underdeveloped. We present a theoretical model of how state-sponsored political identity and attitudes about media freedom influence motivated resistance to censorship in the case of using CCTs to access social media and other forms of online content in the networked authoritarian context of Iran. Employing a web-based survey of internet users ( N = 807), we test this theoretical model across a range of censored online content types. Our findings show that regime ideology in Iran indirectly influences CCT use through biasing perceptions of media freedom and how people respond to it in the form of motivated resistance. We discuss theoretical and policy-related implications for resilience to censorship of social media and online content in networked authoritarian contexts.

Segment and Rule: Modern Censorship in Authoritarian Regimes

“…2 This strategy 1 Empirical evidence suggests that at least 5-10% of internet users have at some point used circumvention softwares to bypass the firewall in China (Chen and Yang, 2019;Hobbs and Roberts, 2018;Shen and Zhang, 2018;Mou, Wu, and Atkin, 2016). Similar evidence has been provided in Iran (Dal and Nisbet, 2022), Russia (Fung, 2022;Xue et al, 2022), Egypt (Lutscher, 2023) or Turkmenistan (Nourin et al, 2023). Further, the very observation of online censorship may reinforce the citizens' incentives to bypass firewalls (Hobbs and Roberts, 2018) and organize political movements (Boxell and Steinert-Threlkeld, 2019;Pan and Siegel, 2020).…”

“…Consider present-day China or Iran. Empirical evidence suggests that the regime strongest opponents do bypass the firewall (Shen and Zhang, 2018;Mou, Wu, and Atkin, 2016;Dal and Nisbet, 2022). Further, these regimes clearly possesses the technological capacity to impose a non-trivial cost of access.…”

“…3 Suggestive empirical evidence in China (Mou, Wu, and Atkin, 2016) and Iran (Dal and Nisbet, 2022) hints at firewall by-passers being more opposed to the regime and exhibiting lower levels of "political trust". 4 Compliance captures any action that benefits the leader such as not joining an opposition movement, criticizing the regime, protesting, or, actively joining the ruling party.…”