Description
Controlling the internet is key to today’s autocracies. But as they seek to control the digital domain, for example to enforce censorship, autocracies must deal with the private actors owning crucial elements of digital infrastructures: from social media platforms to app stores. Foreign ownership may significantly affect the capacity to leverage authoritarian control, for example when it comes to implementing internet shutdowns or online censorship (Earl et al., 2022; Pan, 2017). Given the fact that all autocracies except China are semi- or fully digitally dependent, it is imperative to study to what extent and in what ways these dependencies and their geopolitical implications shape or condition repressive capacities. The paper illustrates its theoretical argument through a case study of Russia, which, over the past decade, has steadily expanded its control over the internet and imposed a widening set of censorship laws. Yet, up until 2021, when Twitter was throttled over its refusal to remove protest-related content, Western platforms remained available alongside their Russian counterparts. As the regime itself turned more repressive, Russia's confrontations with Western social media over content moderation escalated. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked as part of a wider crackdown on free speech and the imposition of wartime censorship. YouTube and Telegram, however remained available (at time of submission). This paper analyses how Russia’s protracted conflict with Western social media finally culminated in 2022 and seeks to explain the differences in how these extended clashes developed over time based on the respective platforms’ functionality, reach and infrastructural interdependence.
