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Abstract

Social media have caused adaptations to existing conceptualizations of democratization, democratic backsliding, and authoritarian hardening. One attempt to capture how social media may solidify authoritarian tendencies while maintaining the government’s popularity is the concept of informational autocracies: rule primarily through the manipulation of information. In this paper, we contribute to Guriev and Treisman’s conceptualizations, who coined the term “informational autocrats” and relied on case studies from around the world. Overall, we expand on existing literature on social media and informational autocracies via a discussion of encrypted messaging apps (e.g., WhatsApp or Telegram) in such contexts. Using a qualitative comparative approach consisting of 68 interviews across 11 country case studies, our analyses demonstrate that the relative secrecy offered by encryption messaging apps can benefit state propagandists and authoritarian tendencies.

Keywords

comparative politics information technology media and communications qualitative methods

Introduction

Systemic transformations moving countries from one type of political system to another are not typically abrupt or linear. Instead, systemic changes tend to build incrementally and face regular backsliding. Given this fluidity, scholars have been concerned with the relevance of the various factors that contribute to systemic political change for decades. With the advent of civic and state engagement on social media—potentially fostering both democratic participation and authoritarian suppression—social media are often examined for their effects (or lack thereof) on political transitions (Sunstein 2017; Tucker et al. 2017; Vaccari and Valeriani 2015; Vanderhill 2013). In Farrel’s (2012) outline of the “Consequences of the Internet for Politics,” he draws on burgeoning research linking the internet to political developments. Since then, however, both international use of social media and understandings of its effects upon politics have markedly advanced (Duffy et al. 2011; Howard 2010; Tucker et al. 2017; Wolfsfeld, Segev, and Sheafer 2013).

Outstanding questions about whether social media are communication tools that contribute to democratization (i.e., “liberation technology”) or facilitate authoritarian solidification via suppression (Bermeo 2016; Christensen 2011; Diamond 2010, 70) have continued to increase in relevance. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated a trend of recent democratic backsliding while user numbers of messaging apps show a continuous upward trend (Repucci and Slipowitz 2020; Statista 2022b). Scholars are divided in their assessments but one factor unites most of them—their focus on “open” social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Kyriakopoulou 2011). This article argues that encrypted messaging apps (EMAs), such as Signal, Telegram, Viber, or WhatsApp are crucial but often underestimated.

We define encrypted messaging apps as those that offer encryption with end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) available, that is, communication which is only visible to the sender and receiver of a message. According to Statista, messaging apps overtook social networking apps as the most popular app category by worldwide reach in 2020 (Statista 2022a; 2022c). But while such statistics are significant, they do not tell us why users rely on these apps or what content spreads over them. Existing research does show that messaging apps are, for instance, not only used for free texting with family and friends across borders but also that they have taken on political significance related to a growing infrastructure that looks beyond one-on-one communication—for instance, Telegram channels or Viber communities (Júnior et al. 2021; Wijermars and Lokot 2022). Researchers have begun to examine how individuals could be better protected from misinformation in countries with a particularly high penetration rate of messaging apps, such as India (Badrinathan 2021). This article, however, goes beyond a discussion of the effects of EMAs on an individual level and works toward a systemic argument. We show that state propagandists incorporate end-to-end encrypted messaging apps into their digital repression toolkit to further spread political propaganda which contributes to democratic backsliding. The article is therefore hypothesis generating on a systemic level.

This argument is informed by research focused on the impact of messaging apps within countries that are on a continuum of non-democracies (as characterized by three indices) and fall under Guriev and Treismann’s scope of informational autocracies (more in section three “Research design” as well as the appendix). The term informational autocracies is henceforth adapted for our case studies and used throughout the article. We include Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Philippines, Turkey, and Ukraine. Are these platforms used to advance authoritarian tendencies in these countries? Are they significant for regime consolidation? Do they allow for democratic resistance? To offer insight into these critical questions we interviewed 68 individuals across these eleven informational autocracies. Interviewees fall into three categories: state propagandists, civil society organizers, and trackers of political content on messaging apps (like journalists). Generally, encryption is understood as a dual use technology, enabling and securing important means of democratic behavior such as free speech removed from regime censors (Dencik, Hintz, and Cable 2019), but also facilitating the spread of disinformation by state propagandists (Farooq 2018).

To best capture the social nuances of the problems associated with this research, we relied upon in-depth qualitative study for two reasons: first, messaging apps are hard to reach spaces for research given their private nature, but particularly difficult to study quantitatively without an open API. Second, qualitative work adds important insights to the field of social media research writ large, which is dominated by quantitative analysis—work that often argues for societal impact on the basis of message reach, consumption and proliferation rather than via particular uses, perceptions and human-centric impacts. This interview based qualitative work also allows for the contribution of crucial socio-political understandings of private platforms.

Literature review

Our research contributes to multiple bodies of literature which focus on social scientific understandings of digital media’s evolving role in political communication. First, while scholars occasionally study messaging apps as relevant platforms for political conversations (Rodrigues 2020), they predominantly focus on peoples’ exposure to news on these apps but neglect the political impact they can facilitate (Klinger and Svensson 2015; Nielsen, Kalogeropoulos, and Fletcher 2020). And while terrorism studies scholars have been analyzing extremists’ use of messaging apps (Shehabat, Mitew, and Alzoubi 2017), political scientists interested in broader developments concerning states’ internal power shifts have been faced with studying the impacts of a multitude of different platforms and forms of communication, which has made it hard to examine the effects of all spaces—especially more private ones (Gunitsky 2015; Vargo, Guo, and Amazeen 2018; Warren 2015). Our research illuminates these gaps in existing research while contributing cross-national evidence related to the political impact of encrypted messaging apps.

We further provide insight into one of the most consequential socio-political debates of the early 21^st century: the conversations on democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation. Dresden and Howard (2016) explain democratic backsliding as a “class of strategies for the concentration of incumbent political power in hybrid regimes” (1122). Such strategies are defined by the manipulation of elections and the suppression of civil liberties alongside the rise of extremely uneven political playing fields and the reduction of the structural constraints on leaders. Scholars continue to tackle these four dimensions in order to explain a global trend of democratic recession (Abdullah 2020; Hartmann and Noesselt 2019; Weidmann and Rød 2019), conceptualize defining characteristics for hybrid regimes (Ekman 2009), argue for a trend of democratic authoritarianism (Brancati 2014) or explain the correlation between increases/decreases of democracy and public support of the system (Claassen 2020). The ways in which each of these dimensions are interconnected via social media use and exploitation is less studied.

Some scholars have picked up the conversation of democratic backsliding as it pertains to social media (broadly defined), such as Hassan, Mattingly, and Nugent (2022) who argue that social media has become part of political control, for example: when it is a vessel for propaganda and indoctrination efforts (Huang 2015). On the one hand, social media might be used to propagate a positive image of the state’s (alleged) competency in governing (Rozenas and Stukal 2019). On the other hand, social media platforms are instead useful in distracting citizens from the state’s shortfalls in order to prevent (possible) collective action (Carter and Carter 2021; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017) or even direct frustrations at the regime’s (potential) competitors (Mattingly and Yao 2022). Censorship is also crucial for informing citizen’s opinions as this measure deletes and hence partially controls public discourse. Therefore, scholars have argued that states censor to avoid resentment and resulting collective action (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013a) but also to inhibit societal discontent initially already (de Juan, Haass, and Pierskalla 2021; Lorentzen 2014). Since censorship on EMAs is much harder than on other social media platforms, the applications’ relevance for regime survival is less clear cut than the better-trodden paths of social media and authoritarian exploitation.

Democratic backsliding and social media

A significant portion of comparative political work examines how various actors and processes (communication, for instance) are related to the formation—and prolongation—of political power (Fox and Waisbord 2002). In order to fully understand these developments in the 21^st century, researchers must consider the impact of social media (Anduiza et al. 2012; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017). Scholars have focused on explaining individual instances of digital mobilization during protests (Anderson 2021; Bennett, Breunig, and Givens 2008; Kuhlmann 2012), the formation of social movements (Loader 2008), and even revolutions (Reinemann 2014)—including the relevance of EMAs, such as Telegram, in challenges to a regime (Wijermars and Lokot 2022). Few, however, have attempted to theorize the broader implications of social media for political developments concerning countries’ trajectory on the autocracy/democracy continuum.

While the implications of social media usage in autocracies are better understood in terms of the state exploiting social media for both survival and strength (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013b; Owen Jones 2022; Pearce 2015; Uniacke 2021), in less authoritarian states these dynamics are under-researched—with an exception of post-Soviet states (Bozóki and Hegedűs 2018; Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018; Knott 2018). An extensive body of literature (Tucker et al. 2018) has developed pushing back against optimistic interpretations (Clarke and Kocak 2020) of social media and democratization (Hindman 2009; Morris 2014; Moss 2016; Nugent 2020)—with some discussing the broader role of the internet in democratic backsliding. For instance, Padmanabhan et al. (2021) outline the various layers of internet shutdowns and censorship employed by Myanmar in the wake of a military coup that aimed to reverse democratic progresses. China has been particularly successful in controlling and coopting the internet via hard and soft measures in order to contribute to the strength of the authoritarian regime under the Communist Party (Kalathil and Boas 2010; Lee and Liu 2012). Russia has also been extensively studied with regard to internal and external propaganda contributing to regime survival (Mader, Marinov, and Schoen 2022).

At the same time, social media still proves a powerful tool of civil resistance (Howard 2010; Roberts 2020; Ruijgrok 2021; Wood 2022). Censorship can bolster anti-regime sentiment (Guriev and Treisman 2020) and push people to learn circumvention tactics, such as using virtual private networks to access forbidden content (Hobbs and Roberts 2018). As Uldam and Vestergaard (2015) argue, social media can highlight new possibilities for bottom-up democratic participation bypassing previous gatekeepers. But is this enough to move a country towards democracy or merely a last resort of civil resistance with little impact on the states’ systematic trajectory? Following existing approaches focused upon asking how one technology (social media) has simultaneously developed as a means for liberation in authoritarian regimes while also being exploited for repression by those regimes (Kalpokas 2016; Pan and Siegel 2020; Tucker et al. 2018), we present further evidence to show how EMAs specifically contribute to authoritarian consolidation.

Finally, Guriev and Treismann add a vital contribution to these scholarly discussions as they forefront the importance of spinning information and outline how leaders can become more authoritarian and popular simultaneously due to well-crafted information control—designating them as “spin dictators” (Guriev and Treisman 2022). EMAs carry contradictory implications for those spin dictators. Their secrecy could on the one hand allow for more manipulative persuasion of the leaders’ agenda as citizens do not expect state propaganda via those private messaging platforms; on the other hand, encryption can also protect civil society advocates sharing “real” information or even organizing anti-regime protests. It is this conundrum we explore, and we ultimately argue that the relative secrecy offered by encryption benefits state propagandists leading to authoritarian bolstering via messaging apps.

Discursive power and messaging apps

The contemporary conditions of political communication present opportunities to update existing comparative approaches (Vowe and Henn 2016). From this perspective, the concept of “discursive power,” captures the essence of politics (power relations) as it is defined as “the proven ability of contributors (…) to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers that come to dominate attention in ongoing political discourse” (Jungherr, Posegga, and An 2019, 17). The comparative approach focuses on identifying similarities and difference of political communication arrangements in n = 2 or more places, regardless of whether they are defined as systems, environments, spheres etc. (Ragin and Zaret 1983).

The established recognition of the “fourth age of political communication” characterized by the sweeping influence of the internet (Blumler 2016) also challenged the remains of any national public sphere (Bennett and Pfetsch 2018; Davis 2019; Wyatt, Katz, and Kim 2000). This increased fragmentation is best described with “hybrid media systems” (Chadwick 2017), which emphasize a multidimensional, constantly evolving communication logic (Nechushtai 2018). Now, the boundaries of political communication systems can be drawn in two ways. Either the boundaries are decided (a) geographically—when the research concentrates on information exchange relations in a particular geographical space, or the boundaries can be drawn (b) thematically—when the focus is on all political, media, and civic actors addressing a particular issue (Wiard and Pereira 2019). While these understandings have proliferated with regard to more open social media platforms (Barberá et al. 2015), the ways in which messaging apps have affected political communication with regard to either (a) or (b) is less explored.

Therefore, we ask if and how encrypted messaging apps are incorporated into authoritarian efforts in “informational autocracies.” These range from EMAs which are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) by default, like Signal, WhatsApp, and Viber, to those that offer—but do not default to—E2EE, like Telegram. Where pertinent, we differentiate between messaging apps. We find that the relative secrecy offered by encryption benefits state propagandists by allowing them to spread messages in an arena largely removed from corporate content moderation regimes. The power acquired by regime representatives translates onto messaging apps and facilitates another avenue for propaganda which contributes to authoritarian tendencies.

Research design

For this paper, we followed a qualitative comparative approach, relying on semi-structured interviews and thematic coding in which we collapsed codes from most specific to most broad, until we had two overarching themes that structured our results section and answered our hypotheses (Braun and Clarke 2006; Flick, Kardorff, and Steinke 2004; Starks and Brown Trinidad 2007). While the research draws on existing theoretical frameworks of “informational autocracies” (Guriev and Treisman 2022) it aims to complement conceptual arguments of the (non-)impact of social media on authoritarian control applying an inductive approach which develops theoretical conceptualizations from the gathered data (Rose 1954).

States, or more precisely informational autocracies, instead of certain segments of the population or time periods build our case studies due to the centrality of a state’s type for the research questions. In order to achieve a level of generalizability that surpasses regional idiosyncrasies and hence carries broader implications, our case studies cover Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America (Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Philippines, Turkey, and Ukraine; n = 11). In our research questions we address evolving and highly nuanced dynamics which are best examined in a qualitative manner that can uncover the factors behind evolving trends which a quantitative approach would be less suited to address. Finally, difficulties with obtaining a high quantity of reliable data in countries such as contemporary Egypt or the Philippines also supports our qualitative approach.

As a basis for designating the country case studies as on a continuum of non-democracies, we relied on three democracy indices: the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) which classifies countries from “hardline autocracies” to “democracies in consolidation”; the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index, which classifies countries from “authoritarian regimes” to “full democracies”; and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), which classifies countries from the top 10 to 50% to the bottom 10 to 50% of democratization. None of our case studies is a “democracy in consolidation,” “full democracy,” or in the top 10 to 40% of democratization. Instead, they range from Ukraine scoring highest on the way out of autocracy (being a “defective democracy”) to Libya scoring lowest (being a “hardline autocracy”) in BTI. In EIU, they include flawed democracies (three), hybrid regimes (four), and authoritarian rule (four). In V-Dem, the countries range from the bottom 40 to 50% at least democratic, and top 40 to 50% at most. All 11 countries exhibit some democratic features, such as regularly held elections (representation) and some institutional responsiveness which has them fulfill requirements for “minimal” democracies focused on procedures (Plotke 2003, 480; Saffon and Urbinati 2013, 441). At the same time, all 11 countries exhibit authoritarian features, such as repression of free speech, exploitation of national security legislation, or exploitation of digital technologies for regime strengthening purposes—to different degrees (Art 2012; Morse 2015; Sherman 2021; Tang and Chen 2021). The countries have undergone more democratic and more autocratic phases, such as Turkey in the early 2000s—when the country experienced competitive elections and a relatively good protection of minority rights—even applying for EU membership (Çarkoğlu, Toprak, and Fromm 2007; Taş 2015). But then increased paranoia and expanding crackdowns on opposition figures but even also academics since the 2016 coup d'état attempt (Christofis 2019). However, all countries, except for Ukraine—which is fighting a war against Russia at the time of writing in Spring 2023 and whose trajectory is undecided—have been displaying democratic backsliding or authoritarian tendencies in recent years (Waldner and Lust 2018).

Furthermore, our research elaborates on the conceptualizations of “informational autocracies” coined by Guriev and Treisman (2022) which centers around country leaders whom the authors describe as “spin dictators [who] manipulate information to boost their popularity with the general public and use that popularity to consolidate political control, all while pretending to be democratic, avoiding or at least camouflaging violent repression, and integrating their countries with the outside world” (18). (See appendix for further information pertaining to our case studies).

Finally, the importance of messaging apps in our case studies has been pointed out in ongoing conversations between the research team and social media company representatives. Although comprehensive data on messaging app use is not available in all country case studies, this importance is also reflected in available numbers of messaging app penetration and usage in the studied countries in the appendix.

Our research team conducted 68 qualitative, semi-structured interviews across Egypt (six), Ethiopia (seven), India (11), Indonesia (five), Libya (six), Mexico (seven), Morocco (five), Myanmar (six), the Philippines (five), Turkey (four), and Ukraine (six) from February of 2020 to May of 2022. Our interviewees spanned a variety of regional experts in order to capture the perspectives of disparate groups knowledgeable about EMAs, encryption, and information challenges in these countries. We spoke to political propagandists or previous political propagandists who spread messaging about the regime (nine), civil society activists (individuals who organize for democracy, fact-checkers, employees of NGOs working to mitigate disinformation) (24), and trackers of political content on EMAs such as journalists, open-source intelligence analysts, and academics (35), who helped to triangulate what we learned from these diverse groups. We contacted members of civil society and researchers by email, and then leveraged snowball sampling from those interviews to reach the hidden or hard to reach populations (Noy 2008) of activists and political propagandists (Howard 2020).

Considering this, we pose the following research question: How do EMAs contribute to authoritarian consolidation and/or democratic resistance in informational autocracies (non-democratic countries with “spin dictators”)?

Results

We put forth two themes regarding the nature of information on EMAs in these informational autocracies. First, we address the ways in which EMAs contribute to authoritarian consolidation because they benefit state propagandists in the service of spin dictators while also serving as mechanisms for challenging, hindering, or attacking political opposition. Second, we provide evidence for the lesser, but still notable, democratic resistance that occurs on and as a result of EMAs in our case countries. Ultimately, our findings support the argument that EMAs bolster authoritarian tendencies in informational autocracies. They are another arm of media in the “information autocracy,” and therefore contribute to democratic backsliding.

Authoritarian consolidation

Our first theme, which focuses on the ways in which EMAs contribute to authoritarian consolidation, addresses several features of EMA use by state propagandists observed across all country case studies. First, we find that EMAs allow for the largescale spread of information, but with few or no checks on the reliability or accuracy of content. Second, we find that state propagandists are refining their strategies for success in co-opting or leveraging EMAs as mechanisms for manipulation and power. Third, we find that the secrecy afforded by EMAs creates challenges for fact-checkers which surpass the barriers they encounter on traditional social media, like Facebook and Twitter. Fourth, we find that fear of all-encompassing surveillance, a worry often supported and encouraged by government actors’ communication, persists even in the “closed” spaces of EMAs. These combined findings provide clear support for the assertion that EMAs contribute to authoritarian consolidation by bolstering informational autocracy.

Increased quantity of information

While the level of sophistication of propaganda messaging on EMAs varies from country to country, the secrecy afforded by encryption benefits propagandists across all cases, according to our interviewees. One way in which the secrecy is beneficial is that it allows for the hidden spread of massive quantities of information: “There’s disinformation going everywhere, spreading everywhere—some of it originates in the diaspora, and some of it originates at home,” a human-rights lawyer in Ethiopia informed us. In India, so-called IT Yoddhas (warriors or combatants, in sanscrit) working for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told us that they were able to push out huge amounts of messaging across the multiple groups they ran or participated in, even after the WhatsApp restrictions on message forwarding and group size because they created and joined so many groups prior to such restrictions. One IT specialist for the BJP also told us that because they had created a network of people rather than bots, these restrictions did not have an impact on their ability to spread propaganda: “If you have people at every level, if you have people-to-people contact, then it doesn’t stop... It’s like you just pass the baton from one to each other...WhatsApp does not say you cannot forward the message to anyone. WhatsApp, in a way, they are just stopping the tools.” An Egyptian civil society activist concurred: he said, “fake news is everywhere” on WhatsApp and Telegram. By overwhelming the information sphere, political propagandists that serve as agents of spin dictators can consolidate and bolster the informational autocracy.

Interviewees informed us that daily communication is plentiful on EMAs, which can be yet another way for propagandists to benefit from the sheer quantity of information that exists in these spaces—not to mention the challenges such swaths of content pose to the few fact-checkers who do manage to oversee (usually through invitation by a group) encrypted content. In Ukraine, Viber is used for everything from chatting with parents at your kid’s school to neighbors in your building. Interviewees report that disinformation exists there, but that Telegram is the main hotbed of disinformation in Ukraine. “It’s actually part of the reason, one of the reasons why disinformation is so easily accepted when it is received from Viber,” a Ukrainian analyst told us, “because it often comes from the people who you personally know and you personally trust. And it also is often a piece of information that…doesn’t look political.” This perceived safety offers a refuge for propagandists: “I think Telegram channels are the major sources of spreading partially correct information, partially fake, or very biased descriptions of information,” a Ukrainian academic told us. A Burmese activist said: “There are so many accounts on Telegram that are spreading false information.” Even in states that are further from the full-authoritarian end of the political spectrum, EMAs are spaces where political propaganda proliferates. In some instances, communication by regular citizens acts as propaganda for spin dictators as well, as explained by an Egypt civil society organizer: “So at first, the simplest way was … to engage people who were supporters of the state and encourage them to be more present by giving them the impression that they are doing a service to the country. I mean, it becomes partially like the military service.” Daily civilian communication, rather than drowning out propaganda, can increase the spread of disinformation and bolster the regime, particularly when it comes from known community members.

Enhanced strategies

Due to the encrypted nature of these platforms, many state propagandists have adapted their previous strategies, for instance, by leveraging coordinated groups of humans, rather than botnets, to spread their messaging in these spaces. This is notable because human-generated messaging is more challenging for researchers and platforms to identify as inauthentic (because it is intentionally “authentic-looking”) or delete (due to free speech concerns) (Monaco and Woolley 2022). Generally, human-created messaging is more sophisticated, as rather than relying on repetitive, easy-to-create (and easy-to-catch) automated scripts, human propagandists are using nuanced, carefully orchestrated messaging (Woolley 2023). For instance, in Mexico, a digital strategist told us he runs different “phone farms,” meaning there are hundreds of accounts run by one person who puts time and effort into their curation. Unlike bots, these “sock puppet” accounts often run undetected. In Libya, too, the Muslim Brotherhood relies on human power to spread their political messages on EMAs. Due to the challenges of the restrictions that EMAs such as WhatsApp have implemented in order to limit the reach of computational propaganda—manipulation perpetrated by bots—propagandists have adapted. They not only push out a large quantity of disinformation, but the quality has increased as a result of the restrictions. As the BJP IT specialist said, “[WhatsApp restrictions] work in our advantage.” A former data strategist with the BJP echoed: “Any party that started in 2014 and created all those groups still controls basically millions of groups right now in India and any other party that’s trying to compete cannot exactly have the same scale of messaging.” The quantity of propaganda is immense, and the quality, while secondary, is increasing.

In some countries, our interviewees informed us that the affordances of EMAs create new challenges for propagandists in measuring engagement, but they solve this problem by pushing out more content. An employee of an Indonesian public relations firm, who gets hired to create false support for political candidates through sock puppet accounts told us that while he struggles to measure engagement on EMAs and cannot use the same strategies that he uses for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, he relies on pushing out large quantities of positive propaganda about his candidate and negative propaganda about the others. This is a case in which he relies purely on quantity over quality, as his tactics that he considers more sophisticated are (currently) ineffective on EMAs. A Filipino researcher provided more insight into why EMAs may be used over traditional social media, given that some of the previously effective strategies do not work in these spaces: “The purpose of transferring all these users to Telegram and encrypted platforms is resilience. If you are trying to further a narrative through Facebook and may get caught, moving people to Telegram allows them to continue to spread the content and build campaign resilience.” This, again, allows for the quantity to increase exponentially, and was supported by members of the Filipino government that we spoke with, who explained that their strategy in engaging with the public on Viber is to blast them with as much pro-Duterte information as possible.

Challenges for fact-checkers

The secrecy provided by encryption further benefits propagandists by creating challenges for fact-checkers across these countries. These members of civil society, importantly, do not benefit from the secrecy provided by encryption. As one Egyptian civil society activist said, “Security [end-to-end encryption] made it harder to battle fake news.” An Indonesian fact-checker told us that fact-checking is relatively successful on open platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but because WhatsApp is closed and encrypted, it is extremely challenging to know what information is being spread there. A fact-checker in Mexico echoed her sentiment, saying that they cannot “infiltrate groups” on EMAs. They must rely on members of the group to share the information with them. This strategy is also used by Turkish fact-checkers, who told us that it is especially challenging on WhatsApp because the groups are closed. Fact-checking disinformation is somewhat easier on Telegram, in which some groups are open. Even when group members do share disinformation with fact-checkers, though, we learned that it’s incredibly challenging due to the quantity of disinformation that exists in these spaces: “Every [piece of] fake news we debunked, there was 15 more produced every day,” a Mexican fact-checker told us. Libyan fact-checkers expressed the same. In Indonesia, we heard: “Hoaxes in Indonesia, in terms of amount, are higher than other countries; and each year, the hoaxes that are debunked by our fact-checkers are increasing.”

Fear persists

In some countries, EMAs are used for discussing political issues and information-sharing separate from the regime, but not for political action beyond that, at least at this time. In part, this is due to the fear of overwhelming surveillance that can exist in an information autocracy. A Moroccan civil society actor told us that, “[WhatsApp is] a useful and efficient way of communication—without it being public you create a small group of people, and you discuss issues—and it’s very effective and everybody uses it.” He continued, “We have large numbers in Morocco who only get the news from WhatsApp and…YouTube.” But Moroccan activists do not tend to trust encryption, as they are too fearful of the regime’s all-encompassing access, and there’s an overwhelming sense throughout the country that the government is watching social media. A Turkish academic echoed this sentiment, explaining to us that social media once served as an alternative to the regime-dominated information sphere, but as the government adapted and began to control the online sphere, including EMAs, trust in encryption is falling. Similarly, in Ethiopia, activists will mobilize on Telegram and Viber, but not WhatsApp, because they tend not to trust the encryption after WhatsApp’s clarification of their data-sharing policies with Facebook caused confusion and fear of lack of privacy. Egyptian activists, we were told, were also frightened by this announcement, causing them to turn toward Signal and even Telegram (despite it not being default E2EE) for security. This is one reason for a lack of democratic action stemming from the information-sharing that occurs on EMAs—fear.

The more authoritarian states are characterized by partial to fully state-controlled media. Though civil society and activists exist on EMAs as will be detailed in the following section, the overwhelming state control has trickled down to EMAs in several instances. The state is able to push out massive amounts of propaganda by doing so in the news media, mainstream social media, and on EMAs—completing the information autocracy by controlling all levels of media and communication. In Egypt, for example, we spoke to a journalist who works for an organization that has been removed from social media platforms for spreading disinformation and political propaganda—she told us that WhatsApp is often used for news, both by journalists and civilians. She communicates with members of the Egyptian government on WhatsApp to get news, which becomes problematic when WhatsApp acts as another arm of state-controlled media, furthering the information autocracy. In the Philippines, we were told by a former member of congress that the Filipino government has invaded Viber. In Morocco, the fear of overwhelming state control (and surveillance, e.g., Pegasus) runs so deep that the population does not trust encryption: “There is no such thing as encryption because they’ll have access to your phones,” a Moroccan academic told us. Activists, he said, are aware that there’s nowhere safe from the Moroccan government.

Democratic resistance

Despite the clear benefits of secrecy to authoritarian consolidation, interviewees also said that the secrecy afforded by encryption allows activists to share a larger quantity of information with one another in relative privacy and safety, particularly in comparison to traditional social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Although EMAs tend to not contribute to direct democratic action given overwhelming fear of regime surveillance, they can provide alternative information to regime propaganda. Further, regimes cannot censor content on EMAs as easily as they can on more open social media platforms. This allows for increased freedom of expression, even as activists continue to battle the fear of all-encompassing surveillance of digital media by spin dictators.

Coordinating political action and information-sharing

Myanmar is the strongest case for how EMAs can motivate democratic action and challenge authoritarian consolidation. In Myanmar, after the coup, EMAs were used to orchestrate political action which went beyond sharing information and news by civil society activists. Civil society activists used these spaces to coordinate democratic action off of the platforms and directly challenge the regime. Burmese activists informed us that they rely on Telegram to read, share, and spread real news, as well as coordinate what they call “mass trending parties” in which many young people coordinate simultaneous tweets in EMAs to get news about atrocities by the regime to trend on Twitter. This would be much more dangerous to do using other social media and nigh impossible in person. On Telegram, Burmese activists also participate in live fact-checking by informing people who spread disinformation that what they’re saying is untrue, in the moment. As opposed to the state propagandists, these civil society activists are working against democratic backsliding, but they are using the same strategy as some propagandists: lots of coordinated information, and quickly. For instance, to get #WhatsHappeninginMyanmar to trend in the United States, these civil society activists use VPNs, change their Twitter locations, and tweet simultaneously, but make hashtag decisions through mobilizing on Telegram and Signal. This coordination has the potential, with other democratic action such as protest occurring in the nation, to challenge the regime and democratic backsliding in Myanmar. One activist expressed this explicitly: “Sometimes we call mass trending parties online protesting,” he said about the trending hashtags they orchestrate on EMAs.

The EMAs that activists consider safe and secure vary from country to country. In Myanmar, civil society activists identified Telegram and Signal as the safest for activism, and made clear that EMAs are much safer from the Tatmadaw than traditional social media like Facebook and Twitter. Libyan activists, we heard, also consider Signal or Telegram the safest of the EMAs (with less trust in, but still use of, WhatsApp and Viber), and Ethiopian activists rely on both Telegram and Viber. Ukrainians with higher media literacy than the general population who want to share secure information, such as politicians and some civil society actors, use Signal too. In Turkey, EMAs remain more trusted than mainstream social media, even though fears are increasing: “If people are scared to share something on social media, they largely go to encrypted messaging applications to feel safer,” said one Turkish academic. Similarly, in Egypt, Signal is one of the only safe spaces for activism, according to some. Offline activism is far too dangerous, but using Signal for resistance is increasing.

Overall, our data largely supports that EMAs do little to challenge democratic backsliding in more authoritarian countries, such as Morocco, given that the fear of the state’s surveillance dissuades people from using any social media, even encrypted, without concern. However, in states that experienced increased democratic backsliding more recently, such as Myanmar, our data paints a far different picture—EMAs are the only safe space to organize and coordinate, and messaging apps there offer nearly the only way to communicate freely and gather information that challenges the regimes.

Discussion

This article develops a theoretically grounded strategy to identify the contribution or insignificance of messaging apps to “informational autocracies.” We find that EMAs are used by agents of spin dictators to prop up and consolidate authoritarian regimes in four main ways: 1) state propagandists rely on the little to no corporate content moderation of EMAs (secrecy) to spread large quantities of positive propaganda about spin dictators and negative propaganda about spin dictators’ political opponents; 2) state propagandists adjust and enhance propaganda strategies for increased efficacy on EMAs; 3) state propagandists benefit from the challenges that civil society such as fact-checkers experience in accessing the encrypted spaces where propaganda spreads; and 4) activists’ fear of overwhelming surveillance of all information spheres by the regime (essentially mistrusting encryption) limits possibilities for democratic resistance and bolsters authoritarian consolidation. Although we found that EMAs are simultaneously valuable spaces for the spread of information that challenges the regime, propagandists continue to have the upper hand in the majority of our country case studies, in large part because of the culture of ever-present surveillance that exists in informational autocracies. Citizens and particularly activists are aware that social media are surveilled and/or controlled by spin dictators, and fear of that surveillance extends to EMAs.

Thus, we expand on current understandings of spin dictators as relying on primarily social media to boost popularity and consolidate power. In our data, it is clear that agents of spin dictators, that is, state propagandists employed either directly or indirectly by spin dictators, rely on encrypted messaging apps in addition to open social media like Facebook and Twitter to boost their popularity through positive propaganda, disparage their opponents through negative propaganda, and cultivate a climate of ever-present informational surveillance to discourage resistance. For instance, this gives the illusion of free and fair elections, but ultimately contributes to authoritarian tendencies through expanding state control by overwhelming private spaces like EMAs and cultivating a climate of fear and surveillance to prevent democratic resistance through self-censoring by activists. In cases where activist information does manage to circulate on EMAs, the fear of moving the activism from online to offline often prevents action, for example, in Egypt and Morocco (Trauthig 2023).

However, in some instances, particularly that of Myanmar, democratic action and resistance remain possible on EMAs. Through sharing legitimate news and coordinating with other activists, some members of civil society effectively mobilize on EMAs. Thus, we cannot argue that EMAs are inherently or exclusively tools of informational autocracies at the expense of democratic resistance. Although we cannot say that EMAs are providing real challenges to regimes in authoritarian states, they do provide unique contributions to democratic resistance, as previous researchers have illuminated (Pang and Woo 2020; Trere 2020). We further find that activists are using EMAs to organize in ways that differ from that of traditional social media organizing (Guntarik and Williams 2019), for instance, mobilizing in smaller, more trusted groups on EMAs and moving larger-scale action to open social media. Future research could therefore include EMAs and examine the apps’ contributions to democratic resistance or even democratization, instead of authoritarian consolidation.

This builds directly on extant literature concerning the role of social media as both authoritarian and democratizing, in other words, neither inherently democratizing nor contributing to authoritarianism, but able to be co-opted for either (Kalpokas 2016; Tucker et al. 2017), but extends this conversation to both the new technology of EMAs, and the solidification of authoritarian states. Propagandists aim to break into the spheres of activists or journalists on EMAs to further their consolidation of power. However, the secrecy on EMAs affords individual civil society activists a relatively safe space for organizing and intervening on the spread of disinformation and propaganda. For now, this may be primarily information-sharing rather than activism, but builds on previous scholarship that has found that challenges to democracy can increase pro-democratic backlash and information-sharing (Claassen 2020; Hobbs and Roberts 2018).

While our results illuminate the ways in which EMAs are used for propaganda and civil society activism, we highlight that they are not fully representative of the countries. The nature of qualitative work in these spaces is that we gain insight into hidden populations and cannot generalize about the countries’ use of EMAs writ large. Thus our aim is to describe and analyze our data providing novel insights into difficult to research spaces, rather than make a causal argument—in the tradition of qualitative comparative politics which main goal is empirical to describe, explain, and predict across political systems (Caramani 2020). The article is therefore hypothesis generating on a systemic level.

As other scholars have noted, open social media platforms continue to be used by civil society activists even under authoritarian regimes (Wood 2022), and will continue to be integral to all actors involved in geopolitical conflicts (Zeitzoff 2017). EMAs are but one arm of both government propaganda and civil society activism, yet they are increasingly relevant. Thus, future researchers would benefit from continuing qualitative inquiry into these platforms. For future research, a spatial comparison exhibiting more longitudinal data would strengthen our arguments and help to distill differences across different time periods. Since comparative research aims to explain different outcomes by focusing on context (Esser and Vliegenthart 2017) tracing the (non-)impact of messaging apps for multiple years would deepen our understandings.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Messaging Apps: A Rising Tool for Informational Autocrats

Supplemental Material for Messaging Apps: A Rising Tool for Informational Autocrats by Inga K. Trauthig, Zelly C. Martin, and Samuel C. Woolley in Political Research Quarterly

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the interview participants for their willingness to speak with us and for providing critical insights. We are sincerely grateful to Mirya Dila, Emily Flores, Katlyn Glover, Anastasia Goodwin, Jacob Gursky, Martin Riedl, and Alexandra Whitlock for their research contributions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is a project of the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin and was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, and The Miami Foundation.

ORCID iD

Inga K. Trauthig

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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