The Informational Mechanism of Authoritarian Diffusion: the Case of Digital Governance

This paper develops the concept of the informational mechanism of authoritarian diffusion to explain how authoritarian practices increasingly shape democratic approaches to internet and platform governance. Existing scholarship on authoritarian diffusion has focused primarily on coercion, emulation, and learning among authoritarian regimes (Ambrosio, 2010), while work on digital governance has documented the horizontal diffusion of information control practices across non-democratic contexts (Kerr, 2018). Less attention has been paid to how informational practices developed within authoritarian environments may nonetheless influence governance trajectories in democratic settings without direct institutional transfer. The paper argues that diffusion in the digital domain operates indirectly through information politics rather than policy replication. Building on research on propaganda, disinformation, and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), it conceptualises authoritarian influence as a systemic effort to reshape information environments rather than persuade specific audiences (Kalathil, 2020). As Kalathil notes, discrediting democracy as a governance model has become significantly cheaper in the digital age, while Rosenfeld (2024) shows how transnational information operations contribute to norm erosion, signalling, and epistemic disruption. Together, these dynamics generate permissive conditions in which restrictive approaches to internet governance become more politically and normatively acceptable within democratic systems. Central to this process is the production of moral panics around the internet and digital platforms. Drawing on Cohen’s (1972) classic formulation, the paper treats moral panics as moments in which digital practices or technologies are framed as existential threats to societal values, enabling accelerated and exceptional regulatory responses. Authoritarian information operations amplify existing anxieties around electoral integrity, public health, youth protection, and national security, which are subsequently mobilised by domestic actors within democracies to justify expanded regulatory intervention. Empirically, the paper draws on comparative illustrations from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia. These cases show how foreign information operations intersect with domestic crises and policy debates, contributing to the securitisation of platform governance, the expansion of content moderation obligations, and the normalisation of exceptional regulatory measures. Rather than demonstrating direct authoritarian policy transfer, the analysis highlights how threat imaginaries circulate and become embedded within democratic regulatory frameworks. The paper also situates artificial intelligence as an accelerator of the informational mechanism of authoritarian diffusion. AI amplifies the scale and speed of information manipulation, intensifies moral panics through concerns over deepfakes and algorithmic persuasion, and facilitates the institutionalisation of securitised governance through risk-based regulatory approaches. The paper concludes that authoritarian diffusion in the digital domain operates through informational mechanisms that reshape regulatory imaginaries and transform democratic internet governance from within, without eroding democratic institutions in formal terms.