Justifying digital oversight: Informational learned helplessness and support for social media monitoring in conflict settings

Digital platforms have become central arenas for contesting political narratives in conflict-affected societies across the Global South and East. At the same time, states have expanded their digital oversight capacities, making it essential to understand when and why citizens would endorse such interventions. To address this tension, this study examines why citizens support state monitoring of conflict-related speech online, and whom they prefer to be monitored. While existing research on digital authoritarianism predominantly focuses on state capacity and technological aspects, I advance a social-psychological account that helps explain the demand-side foundations of digital repression. I argue that support for digital monitoring is shaped by informational learned helplessness (ILH), which stands for the perceived inability to reliably judge the accuracy of political information in high-noise, high-stakes contexts. Conflict environments are especially conducive to ILH, given verified and unverified claims circulate simultaneously and with increasing ease, state and non-state actors promote competing narratives, and the responsibility for distinguishing truth from manipulation increasingly shifts onto ordinary citizens. In such settings, where speech is evaluated not only for its accuracy but also for its security implications, citizens may come to regard institutional filtration and surveillance as protective substitutes for their own judgment. To examine this argument, I draw on original nationally representative survey data collected face-to-face in Türkiye in 2025 (N = 1,862), a critical case in the Global South/East where democratic erosion has unfolded alongside expanding media oversight. Türkiye’s long-lasting conflict with Kurdish actors provides a highly politicized information environment where competing conflict narratives and identity cleavages coexist. The analysis investigates the predictors of support for government monitoring of conflict-related social media content, measured across distinct source types including mainstream media outlets, journalists, NGOs, and ordinary citizens. The findings demonstrate that higher ILH strongly predicts greater support for monitoring across all source types. Namely, citizens doubting their ability to discern reliable information in conflict settings tend to be more willing to delegate evaluative authority upward to state institutions. Moreover, for respondents identifying as Kurdish, this significant association is weaker when it comes to mainstream media outlets’ conflict related-social media content, consistent with group-congruent expectations. This highlights how identity and conflict experience shape not only exposure to digital authoritarianism but also citizens’ preferred targets of oversight. The study also incorporates conflict-specific orientations, such as attitudes toward Türkiye’s peace (or “opening”) process and views of the Turkish state’s role in the conflict, which are factors that have rarely been integrated into research on digital repression. Including these measures allows the analysis to situate informational dynamics within the broader political and conflict-related perceptions that shape citizens’ judgments. The study offers three main contributions. First, it illuminates how digital authoritarian practices gain social legitimacy in hybrid regimes by linking psychological vulnerability to support for state monitoring. Second, it highlights the role of ordinary users as active participants in the reproduction of digital authoritarian modalities. Third, more broadly, the study advances a comparative agenda that engages with the everyday cognitive pressures shaping citizen responses to digital governance.