More appetite for control? Comparing online content regulation and their legitimation across regime types during the Covid-19 crisis

While Internet control has long been perceived as an exclusive domain of autocratic regimes, the focus of attention has recently shifted towards liberal democratic states due to their in-creased activities of online content regulation. What is obvious for democracies, namely that it is difficult to gain legitimation for practices of internet control, might also hold for autocra-cies, though to a different extent and quality, and should thus not be neglected. Based on theo-retical and empirical work on legitimatory politics, we identify a common challenge for both types of regimes and their subtypes in their need to address and accommodate conflicting in-terests of societal actors and thus gain legitimation within the respective political setting. Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, we argue that the pressure for legitimatory politics might have changed. Our assumption is that the Covid-19-pandemic presents an op-portunity for tightening of the reins in Internet control. On one hand side, the pandemic opened the avenue for a variety of emergency measures that might have facilitated to imple-ment online content regulation. On the other hand side, conspiracy myths and information manipulation produced by Covid-19 deniers might induce governments to reflect about how to tackle this problematic communication during a crisis. Against this backdrop, our research question is whether the regime influence on online content regulation is affected by Covid-19 as facilitating context of legitimating control across regime types. Therefore, we choose a multi-method research design: Firstly, we examine if and to what de-gree governments of different regime types stepped up their Internet control measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is done by a quantitative comparative analysis of online content regulation relying on datasets on Internet control such as provided by Freedom House (Free-dom on the Net) and V-Dem. Secondly, based on this quantitative assessment, we take a deeper look at those cases with salient features according to our research question through a qualitative study of legitimatory strategies of governments when justifying restrictive measures. The innovative approach of this paper is that it accounts for democracies, autocracies and their subtypes and thus can offer a more fine-grained picture of current trends in Internet con-trol. The added value lies in the regime sensible study of online regulation. The results of this analysis contribute to the research in the intersection of Internet control and regimes studies.