When Do Nondemocracies Legalize Online Information Control?

Restrictive Internet laws, such as “fake news” legislation, can create a chilling effect on online dissent. This research examines why some authoritarian regimes adopt legal instruments to authorise, legitimise, and reinforce broader strategies of online information manipulation, while others do not. I argue that nondemocratic regimes’ approaches to online repression are shaped primarily by the autonomy of opposition parties and civil society. These two sources of domestic opposition generate incentives for online repression, but greater autonomy in either increases the political costs of doing so, thereby influencing the form repression takes. Using cross-national panel data and fixed-effects survival analysis, I find that, when confronted with comparable threats from online mobilisation, higher levels of opposition and civil society autonomy reduce the likelihood that nondemocratic governments employ legal instruments to justify online repression. However, in closed autocracies, a more vibrant civil society renders the adoption of such laws more likely. In the online sphere, rulers from these contexts are mainly concerned with threats emerging from the masses, as they have already eliminated or co-opted outlets from organised opposition powers, and they use law as a performative tool for social control. These findings uncover the conditions under which autocracies employ legal veneers to legitimise information control and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of authoritarian resilience in the digital age.