Social Unrest or Political Constraints? Explaining Internet Content Removal Requests

It is often assumed that controlling internet content is the domain of authoritarian regimes, but democratic countries also regulate and censor the internet and increasingly use intermediaries (such as online service providers) to do so. Whereas some authors argue that content regulation is mainly driven by demands for control such as political and social unrest, others argue that political and institutional constraints such as regime type and the rule of law are important predictors as well. For instance, there is a demand for internet content control in democratic regimes, but political constraints reduce control possibilities. Hence, I look at the trends of content removal requests to intermediaries by democratic and authoritarian countries, and try to explain these requests by demand and political variables. First, using panel data based on transparency reports of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Wikimedia, I look at trends in content removal requests by governments. Second, I zoom in on requests to Google by estimating a (two-stage) zero-inflated negative binomial regression. Hereby, I do not only explain content removal requests by demand and political variables but also look at how these variables can explain which frames governments use in their requests (e.g. national security, hate speech and defamation).