Dictators across the Cyber-Verse: Between Repression and Surveillance there is… something?

Without a doubt, recent years have demonstrated that dictatorships rely on the digital: as part of a “menu of autocratic innovation” (Morgenbesser 2020), digital technologies are perceived as transforming autocratic rule across different fields, including informational, legal, political, technological, and infrastructural. Social media receives particular attention in this context: several contributions document coordinated influence campaigns on popular platforms. It also appears that social media are used for purposes of surveillance, intimidation, and repression by autocratic regimes. While scholarly debate often circles questions around the repressive nature of social media in this context, little attention is given to an almost mundane question: why, despite increasingly narrowing digital spheres, do “ordinary” citizens of autocratic regimes nonetheless use these platforms, even to voice criticism? I argue that social media are complementary to (offline) tools of autocratic regime survival: viewed top-down, social media not only offer the possibility for repression, co-optation of influencers, or to spread legitimizing narratives beyond national borders. Moreover, I argue, vital state-society interactions take place on the platforms: Criticism within a given framework is tolerated in order to compensate for an information deficit (qua form of rule). Additionally, members of society use the platforms to express their needs, insecurities, criticism, or approval, because they thereby experience responsiveness and accountability from the regime. Drawing on (Arabic-language) tweets around climate-related events and government statements on climate change-related measures or strategies between 2017 and 2022, I aim to explore how state-society relations in Saudi Arabia are transforming on the microblog Twitter and what implications these have for political science research on autocratic regimes.