COVID-19 and digital authoritarianism: Identifying risks and countermeasures

The advances in digital technologies have positive effects on various aspects of life but can also pose a threat to privacy and freedom and foster repression and authoritarian tendencies. Since 2020, various scholars and rights groups have especially warned against the proliferating dangers of ‘digital authoritarianism’ in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. To adequately respond to these dangers, we need to uncover the core characteristics of digital technologies that make them susceptible to authoritarian use in the first place, evaluate the pandemic’s impact on these aspects, then discuss potential measures democracies could enact to counter digital authoritarianism. This paper highlights three characteristics of digital technologies that make them susceptible to authoritarianism: the far-reaching and multi-purpose capabilities of these technologies, their entrenchment in an ecosystem that incentivizes authoritarian practices, and the general lack of literacy regarding the authoritarian use, capabilities, and ecosystem of these technologies. Surveying a wide-range of data, I argue that the pandemic fostered digital authoritarianism in both dictatorships and democracies, but that it also grants democracies a unique opportunity to raise awareness of digital technologies’ dangerous capabilities and their authoritarian-friendly ecosystem. I conclude by presenting recommendation for policy makers, civil society actors, citizens, and academics in democracies.