In recent years, we have witnessed the proliferation of two global "mega" trends: the world is becoming more digitized and more authoritarian. Many democracies worldwide suffer a gradual but substantial deterioration, and several non-democratic regimes manifest harsher forms of authoritarianism. Against this backdrop, the initial optimism regarding digitization's impact on political processes gave way to widespread concerns about authoritarian uses of digital technologies (digital authoritarianism) both in democracies and non-democracies. Digital authoritarianism encompasses a range of digitally assisted practices and the underlying infrastructures that enable these practices. It is facilitated by the increasing reliance on digital technologies, the consequent generation of unprecedented amounts of data, and the unparalleled capacity to exploit this data.
The study of digital authoritarianism includes purposeful authoritarian practices of covert surveillance methods, widespread censorship, online and digitally-assisted offline repression, disinformation campaigns, and the manipulation of voting behavior. It also includes investigating harmful by-products of digitization and economic incentives that drive technological innovation (i.a: Zuboff 2019). However, unremitting technological advancements continue to test the limits of our methodological and conceptual toolbox in understanding the intersection between technology and political regimes. Despite the burgeoning literature on these issues, we still lack comparative research that seeks a holistic understanding of the many faces of digital authoritarianism and plausible regulatory and political practices to counter it.
This section investigates the different authoritarian ramifications of digitization and digital technologies. Our planned panels (see below) cover many themes that foster a better understanding of this phenomenon, and we are happy to include externally proposed panels that widen the scope of this coverage.
Suggested Panels:
Panel 1: Digital Authoritarianism and Generative AI
Chair: Hossein Kermani
The recent development of Generative AI (GenAI) and pervasive language models (LLMs) has raised further concerns about how non-democratic forces can use Gen AI in malicious campaigns in democratic and non-democratic societies. In practice, GenAI provides more effective and novel ways of using big data to surveil and control society. Additionally, it facilitates the creation and dissemination of fake news and fabricated stories, such as deepfake videos, for opinion manipulation and polarization. While these nefarious developments overlap with previous techniques, they could also be unique and harmful in unknown ways. The adoption of datafication and GenAI provides non-democratic forces with a powerful weapon to scrutinize, control, manipulate, and suppress our actions in digital spaces on an unprecedented scale. This rapid growth of AI-driven techniques, coupled with the adaption of authoritarian regimes and the rise of radical groups globally, makes it of paramount significance to scrutinize and compare different dimensions of this topic.
This panel provides a comparative perspective on how non-democratic forces around the globe have employed GenAI for surveillance, control, and manipulation. In addition, the panel addresses emerging technologies like LLMs and considers multimodalities, such as Generative Emotion AI (GE-AI) and image analysis.
Panel 2: "Comparative Approaches to Digital Authoritarianism"
Chair: Gregory Asmolov
Most research on digital authoritarianism focuses primarily on either specific practices or a limited number of cases; existing works also rarely compare the practices of digital authoritarianism in different types of political regimes. This lack of comparative insight impedes a holistic understanding of digital authoritarianism's impact on politics. For instance, variations in Internet regulation can result from differences in the extent to which the rule of law exists in democratic and authoritarian regimes; they can also relate to the unique features of each political system, the historical context for the development of national Internet segments, and cultural and economic factors. Comparatively exploring these factors and the variations of digital authoritarianism in democracies and non-democracies can help provide a more nuanced account of digital authoritarian practices and identify possible future trajectories for new forms of digital authoritarianism. This panel focuses on the comparative study of digital authoritarianism.
Panel 3: "Big Data Transformations: Does Regime Type Matter?"
Chair: Ahmed Maati
Ongoing technological advancements are enabling the generation of Big Data – i.e., the gathering and processing of large amounts of information – at an increasingly exponential rate. This has triggered discussions of threats and opportunities in various technical, academic, and policy-making fields. However, while Big Data and the technological advancements underlying it have received considerable scholarly attention in political science, only a few works compare their impact on and in different regime types: Does the increasing ability to gather and analyze information create similar threats and chances in different regime types, or do chances and threats differ according to the type of political regime? And how does Big Data – the availability of large amounts of information – affect ruling dynamics in and strategies of different political regimes (among others: legitimacy, cooptation, repression, participation)?
Whereas these broad inquiries can potentially trigger the most comprehensive range of research themes and designs, we would like to invite comparative analyses that focus on Big Data across different regime types. By doing so, we hope to deliver analyses that transcend what we see as a weakness in the current literature, which is primarily divided between works that focus on such effects in authoritarian regimes and those that focus on democracies. This comparative focus enables us to welcome a wide range of thematic foci and works that focus on either Big Data or the technological tools used to generate it.
Panel 4: "Gendered Perspectives on Digital Authoritarianism"
Chair: Sözen Ülker
This panel intends to bring together researchers working on how gender and social reproduction play out in authoritarian arrangements on digital media and platforms. The crisis of social reproduction is a central dimension of the global poly-crisis of our age, which concretely manifests in the rise of anti-gender discourses, sexism, and hypermasculinity that characterize many authoritarian regimes and movements. In this respect, this panel seeks to address the bottom-up currents and the state-induced and platformized restraints that enact authoritarian modalities within the digital media and platform capitalism framework. Furthermore, it aims to discuss the feminist, queer, and labor-related resistances and counter-mobilizations utilizing and taking shape in digital media.
