From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy

Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, Pablo Barberá

Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 4, October 2017, pp. 46-59

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0064

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 From Liberation to Turmoil:
Social Media and Democracy
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts,
and Pablo Barberá

Joshua A. Tucker is professor of politics and a cofounder and codi-

rector of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) labo-
ratory at New York University. Yannis Theocharis is a research fel-
low at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).
Margaret E. Roberts is assistant professor of political science at
the University of California, San Diego. Pablo Barberá is assistant
professor in the School of International Relations at the University
of Southern California. All the authors contributed equally, and are
listed in reverse alphabetical order. A portion of this essay draws on
ideas in Roberts’s forthcoming book Censored: Distraction and Diver-
sion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press).

In 2010, Time magazine chose Mark Zuckerberg as its annual “Person

of the Year.” He had, said the newsweekly, turned “the lonely, antisocial
world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world”
through his vastly popular social-media platform Facebook.1 A year
later, Zuckerberg’s portrait in Time was replaced as Person of the Year
by that of “the protester.” This figure represented those who had voiced
dissent—often by organizing on Facebook or Twitter—against authori-
tarian rulers in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, as
well as those who had taken to the streets for months against unemploy-
ment, austerity, and inequality in, among other democratic countries,
Greece, Spain, and the United States.
Fast forward six years, and Time’s Person of the Year was the sitting
president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The president respond-
ed to the announcement through his favorite communications channel,
Twitter: “Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming
me ‘Person of the Year’—a great honor!”2 Twitter was an especially
appropriate medium for his response, given the outsized role that social
media were reputed to have played in the 2016 U.S. election. Indeed,
the importance of social media in that election has grown to the point

Journal of Democracy Volume 28, Number 4 October 2017

© 2017 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 47

that a special counsel has been appointed and has put together a team
“stacked with prosecutors and FBI agents well equipped to investigate
the Moscow-connected Twitter bots and Facebook trolls that churned
out campaign-related headlines boosting Trump’s candidacy.”3 In other
words, in only five years social media have gone—in the popular imagi-
nation at least—from being a way for prodemocratic forces to fight au-
tocrats to being a tool of outside actors who want to attack democracies.
Social-media technology is young, but has already played a part in
numerous turbulent protests and a highly polarized U.S. election. Social
media have often been described as the site for conflict between “good”
democratic forces who use social media to make their voices heard and
“bad’’ autocratic and repressive forces who aim to censor this channel to
silence these liberal elements. However, recent worries that illiberal and
extremist forces might use the freewheeling world of online communi-
cations to undermine democracy reversed the discussion about social
media. After the 2016 U.S. election, even leaders of democracies called
for greater “regulation” of the internet. In this, they echoed—to a degree
at least—authoritarian rhetoric that promotes censorship and “public-
opinion guidance.”4
Is there a theoretical framework linking social media and politics that
can shed light on these turnabouts and contradictions? We think that
there is. Let us begin with two simple observations. First, social media
give a voice to those whose views are normally excluded from political
discussions in the mainstream media. With social media, people can find
like-minded compatriots, organize protests and movements, and support
political candidates and parties. In short, social media solve collective-
action problems that have long bedeviled those traditionally shut out of
mainstream politics. This can include prodemocratic forces, of course.
Social media can give them new means of holding governments ac-
countable and pressing for wider political inclusion; hence the early and
hopeful talk about “liberation technology” as a feature of the digital age.
Yet social media can obviously amplify other and more extreme voices
as well, including those which, from the point of view of liberal democ-
racy, are “antisystem.”
Second, and counterintuitively, the very openness of the social-media
environment can be used to foster censorship: The platforms of infor-
mation freedom can be exploited in order to silence others. To date,
these activities have been most visible in the responses of nondemo-
cratic regimes to antiregime activity online. Authoritarian censors now
know how to wield online harassment, propaganda, distraction, and
denial-of-service attacks to muzzle critics and shut down or distort the
information space. To complicate matters, illiberal, antisystem forces
within democratic regimes have learned how to use these authoritarian
methods for exploiting open information platforms. Thus social-media
strategies pioneered by nondemocracies for authoritarian ends are now
48 Journal of Democracy

affecting political life in the world’s democracies. The question of how

democracies should react to this new, technologically generated chal-
lenge remains unresolved.
This double reality of the open online world—able to give a voice
to the voiceless, but also bendable toward the aims of censorship and
exclusion—explains why thoughts about social media can run either to
optimism or (as has been more the case recently) to pessimism when
it comes to the implications for democracy.5 The heart of the matter is
that, while freedom of information online is an inherently democratic
principle, social media are neither inherently democratic nor inherently
undemocratic. Rather, social media constitute a space in which politi-
cal interests battle for influence, and not all these interests are liberal or
democratic.
This simple theoretical framework explains how social media can be
at once a technology of liberation, a technology useful to authoritarian
governments bent on stifling dissent, and a technology for empowering
those seeking to challenge the status quo in democratic societies—in-
cluding previously marginalized extremist groups. Two caveats are in
order, however. First, while we think that there has been a historical
evolution of the use of social media—democrats harnessed social media
to oppose authoritarianism; authoritarian regimes responded by raising
their own “online game”; then antisystem forces in democracies started
copying the new authoritarian methods—this sequence is for now best
treated as a hypothesis for testing rather than as a proven fact. Second,
although we focus on the ways in which social media have given voice
to democratic actors in nondemocratic systems and antisystem actors
in democratic systems, our overall claim is that social media have giv-
en voice to marginalized groups. This can also include groups that run
with, rather than against, the grain of the regime; in other words, social
media can also be useful to prodemocratic voices in democracies and
antidemocratic voices in autocracies.

A New Hope: Liberation Technology

Social media have transformed the way we communicate, interact, and
consume many kinds of information, including political information. In
technological jargon, social media form a set of interactive Web 2.0 ap-
plications that enable the creation and distribution of user-generated con-
tent (such as text, photos, and videos) instantly and across vast networks
of users. Unlike previous computer-mediated technologies, social media
enable users to become active producers of content (rather than merely
consumers), while articulating and making visible their connections with
other individuals with whom they interact and collaborate. Social media
have changed the structure of communication by allowing individual us-
ers to broadcast information. This creates a “many-to-many’’ structure of
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 49

communication that differs from the traditional “one-to-many” structure,

which allows only a few users (various elites, traditional media) to broad-
cast to the wider public. This many-to-many structure allows for coordi-
nation among individuals and for messages or content sent through such
platforms to go “viral”—that is, to be spread horizontally across peer-to-
peer networks almost in real time.6
These new features highlight what makes social media such a potent
political tool both within and beyond the ambit of institutions. First, about
two-billion people, or more than a quarter of the world’s population, take
part in social media. Across societies, social media are quickly becoming
the primary source from which people get their information. According
to data from the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of U.S. adults now get
their news via social media, while the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News
Report shows that 46 percent of Europeans use social media for news.7
Further, there is some evidence that social media can produce a better-
informed public and increase exposure to cross-cutting political views.8
When unrest challenges nondemocratic regimes, social media’s abil-
ity to convey information shines. International journalists, people “on
the ground,” influential regional and global actors, and general readers
can all connect over social media. The Arab Spring is an oft-cited ex-
ample of how social media can catapult the marginalized to national and
international prominence overnight. During Iran’s 2009 Green Wave
movement, social media provided street-level protesters with commu-
nications and brought the Islamic Republic’s abuses of power to the
attention of international media despite heavy censorship and a regime
crackdown on the internet. Social media linked cheated voters, disaf-
fected young people, and beaten protesters, creating serious problems
for the regime.9
The many-to-many nature of social media makes it possible to coor-
dinate collective action in ways that enhance participation in democratic
societies, sometimes even in the absence of formal organizations. Per-
sonal stories and symbols spread via social media can be potent mobiliz-
ers. Empirical research on Facebook’s mobilization effects during elec-
tions has shown that the appearance of messages on users’ news feeds
can directly influence political self-expression, information-seeking,
and voting behavior.10 Studies of the Indignados movement in Spain
found that, even aside from influential users and their information cas-
cades, the sheer numbers of grassroots and common users involved in
low-cost social-media activism can give them wide audience reach.11
Relatedly, by making available new and expressive forms for participa-
tion in the political process, social media have become important for
facilitating the diffusion of messages from highly committed groups of
users across networks and toward less invested peripheral participants
who help to increase the magnitude of online mobilization by way of
mini-participation.12 This in turn can lead to an increase in public and
50 Journal of Democracy

media attention—as exemplified by the emergence of the Tea Party and

Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the possibility for offline mo-
bilization, exemplified by the Arab Spring protests, Occupy Wall Street,
and Spain’s 15M.
Thus social media have the potential to aid democratic movements
by spreading information, reinvigorating participation, and facilitating
collective action. In a nutshell, social media can democratize access to
information and communication tools. Groups that would ordinarily be
censored or silenced can reach a mass public and find it easier to hold
powerful elites accountable.
As social media’s potential advantages and benefits for those seek-
ing to further democracy become more evident, however, so do social
media’s weaknesses. Although these platforms clearly enable disparate
and previously unconnected individuals to organize sudden protests, it
is not so clear that they can put sustained pressure on elites, an essential
requirement not only for the process of democracy-building, but also
for keeping a given issue on the agenda. The difference between these
outcomes, moreover, may be precisely the hierarchical organizations
that social media are so good at obviating. Without such organizations,
internet-enabled democratic activism can turn out to be a flash in the
pan, giving off some heat and light but quickly burning out and having
no lasting effect. However, this is likely also the case because autocratic
governments, too, can harness the internet to deactivate the potential for
long-term change. We turn to this perspective next.

The Empire Strikes Back: Repression Technology

Resistance to social media’s democratic potential has always been
inevitable. Governments threatened by efforts to hold them more ac-
countable would look for ways to push back. As some pointed out early
on, autocratic regimes quickly adapted to limit the impact of this new
technology.13 Many of the tools that they use for this purpose are famil-
iar censorship strategies—devised long ago offline, but now deployed
online—that are meant to silence opposition to authoritarianism. Others,
however, are new and specific to the world of social media. These in-
clude tactics designed to exploit the many-to-many nature of the internet
in ways that amplify the regime’s messages while muffling the opposi-
tion’s. All the tools, old and new, can be sorted into three categories
that Margaret Roberts, in her forthcoming book, calls “the three Fs”:
There is fear, which is the force behind censorship that deters. There is
friction, which is censorship that delays. And there is flooding, which is
censorship that distracts or confuses.14
First, autocrats can aim to limit online activism by intimidating and
jailing (or worse) those who use online platforms for dissent and opposi-
tion. “Fear” tactics are part of the autocrat’s traditional toolbox, meant
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 51

to make those inclined to speak out keep silent instead. According to the
Committee to Protect Journalists, 259 journalists were in jail around the
world as of December 2016.15 Many of these journalists have published
stories online dealing with matters such as inequality, protests, and cor-
ruption—all “forbidden topics” in the eyes of powerholders who do not
want to be held accountable. Examples also abound of governments
targeting ordinary citizens who have used online platforms to spread
information that governments do not want disclosed. Although there is
no formal tally of how many bloggers are behind bars, a Google News
search for “blogger arrested” yields thousands of hits. In the hands of
states, the digital tracking power of the internet has made regime foes
easy to identify and apprehend.
Even allowing for all this, however, the internet has so dramatically
expanded the numbers and types of people who take part in the public
sphere that traditional forms of repression are becoming too costly for
authoritarian regimes to bear. Only in some totalitarian regimes can all
or nearly all the people be held in fear; in most autocracies, omnipresent
fear can create backlash as well as problems for information collection
and innovation.16 Therefore, autocrats have created quieter “friction”
tactics to use against the internet. These include sophisticated block-
ing systems such as the infamous “Great Firewall of China,” internet
slowdowns and shutdowns, surgical removal of social-media posts, and
algorithmic manipulations of search results to suppress information that
autocrats dislike. In many cases, social-media users may not even real-
ize that they are being affected by such censorship, making it all but
impossible to avoid or counter.17
While autocrats can use repression technology to undermine freedom
of information online, these same regimes can also twist the free and
open nature of social media to their own advantage. The battle for the
social-media space goes to those who can push their information to the
top of the pile. Recognizing this, authoritarian regimes have harnessed
the ability of anyone to post on social-media platforms in order to pro-
mote regime agendas and drown out those of regime opponents. This is
“flooding.”
For example, authoritarian governments can pay posters to spread
strategically timed messages on social media. They can also use au-
tomated bots weaponized to promote government propaganda or flood
antiregime protest hashtags. These human or automated online armies
may promote regime propaganda, or they may disrupt the opposition by
creating distractions. They may also spread misinformation to confuse
people and degrade the usefulness of online information, or they may
harass regime opponents online.18
Government-coordinated online campaigns to push propaganda or
silence critics are simultaneously forms of participation and censor-
ship. The internet’s open nature allowed regime opponents—shut out of
52 Journal of Democracy

mainstream, state-run media—to publicize their views and organize for

political action. Authoritarian governments, however, then try to coun-
ter them by organizing mass online campaigns of their own. That some-
thing as quintessentially liberal as the internet’s very openness can be
used in efforts to censor and to promote illiberal values is a quandary for
scholars and policy makers alike. Like the dangers that “clickbait farms”
pose to search engines and that fake reviews pose to online reviewing
systems, the strategic introduction of pseudonymous political informa-
tion threatens social media’s already fragile status as an arena for true
public deliberation. The trick of “flooding the (social-media) zone” as
a form of censorship is therefore a particularly powerful political tool,
and it can be more widely harnessed than just by state actors attempting
to undermine broad political participation and discussion in their own
countries.

Return of the Antisystem Forces: Tumultuous Technology

As we have seen, the same infrastructure that can empower demo-
cratic opposition can also be used for authoritarian purposes. The tac-
tics pioneered by authoritarian regimes, however, are also available to
groups that operate within democratic societies to pursue illiberal aims.
The same mechanism that played such a huge role in the Arab Spring—
social media’s ability to give voice to the voiceless—is now empower-
ing groups on the margins to challenge core democratic values. Perhaps
the clearest example of this is the manner in which terrorist groups such
as ISIS have turned social media into their main communication chan-
nel—to recruit foreign fighters, to coordinate attacks, and to amplify
their activities by instantly reaching vast international audiences.19
But this trend is not limited to external groups. As Alice Marwick
and Rebecca Lewis note, “while trolls, white nationalists, men’s rights
activists, gamergaters, the ‘alt-right,’ and conspiracy theorists may di-
verge deeply in their beliefs, they share tactics and converge on com-
mon issues.”20 There are many reasons, of course, for the recent increase
in visibility of these groups, yet the rise of social media has undoubt-
edly made it easier for people who hold minority views within their
own communities to find like-minded others in other locations and form
larger communities than would have been possible before the digital era.
At the same time, as journalists and traditional media outlets see their
gate-keeping and fact-checking roles diminish, more controversial ideas
can go unchallenged; they can be bolstered by the algorithmic features
of online platforms that incentivize clickbait headlines and emotional
messages, and then propagate widely with the help of paid trolls and
bots to reach larger segments of the populace. In this way, antisystem
actors in democracies can not only draw on the lessons learned by those
who originally harnessed social media on behalf of prodemocratic move-
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 53

ments in more authoritarian countries, but can also use the very tools
(such as trolls and bots) developed by authoritarian regimes to coun-
ter democracy movements. Indeed, as some have suggested, antisystem
movements in democracies may literally be using the tools—such as
bot-nets—that authoritarian regimes developed to combat their own on-
line foes.21 This new situation may very well have caught democratic
political systems off guard in much the same way that social media sur-
prised nondemocratic regimes earlier in the decade.
As noted, social media can lend a voice to anyone whose attitudes and
beliefs may traditionally have been considered too far outside the main-
stream. This can include antisystem forces that actively seek to undermine
liberal democracy, but also political groups whose aim is to transform
democratic politics to reduce economic and political inequality. Although
not all these groups express outright hostility to liberal democracy, a com-
mon thread is their eagerness to raise the profile of policy preferences that
previously had been found unacceptable or otherwise unworthy of atten-
tion by mainstream politicians, parties, and media organs.
The emergence so close together in time of populist parties of the right
and left in Europe, of Donald Trump’s electorally successful anti-immi-
grant and protectionist platform in the United States, and of movements
to protest socioeconomic inequality (such as Occupy Wall Street in the
United States or the Indignados movement in Spain) underlines the grow-
ing importance of social media in democratic systems. To be clear, we are
not saying that social media can explain the recent rise of populism. Yet
populists have clearly found online platforms helpful as their once-margin-
alized voices have gained volume under the new rules of the digital age.
These rules are transforming democratic politics in two important ways.
First, campaigns and movements of this new type have learned not
only from their own patterns of use across the years, but especially from
the diffusion and mobilization practices of election campaigns in de-
mocracies. In the United States, pioneering social-media campaigns by
Democratic Party politicians such as Howard Dean and Barack Obama
had a massive impact on how information and communication technolo-
gies have been deployed in order to win over the public.22 At least since
Obama’s win in 2008, actors both inside and outside the electoral arena
have taken note of innovative political uses of social media, and learned
to reinvent their methods of approaching the public. What was once the
province of mainly young and technologically literate politicians has now
gone mainstream, and an entirely new political battlespace has opened.
A second way in which social media allow challengers to the status
quo to profit from new rules is the terseness that dominates social-
media exchanges. Twitter, with its 140-character limit per tweet, is
not only poorly suited to fostering nuanced discussion, but also can be
used to undermine basic tenets of the democratic public sphere. 23 On-
line trolls are usually not interested in argument-based conversation:
54 Journal of Democracy

Their goal is to trigger a cascade of harassment that can silence or de-

mobilize other individuals or public officials, or to create distractions
that refocus online users on another issue or message. Social media
have been elevated as powerful tools in the hands of populist candi-
dates and parties precisely because social media allow them to create
spectacle rapidly, while simultaneously avoiding discussions that they
might appear to “lose.” Why even engage in a discussion when you can
get all the exposure you need through a provocative statement?
Far-right parties in Europe provide excellent examples of this trend.
The founder of the German anti-immigrant movement Pegida (the word is
a German acronym that stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islam-
ization of the West) appeared to resign from his leadership position after
an alleged image of him posing as Hitler was released, yet he was rein-
stated shortly after.24 Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has routinely
used Twitter to cause outrage by calling his leftist rivals “Islamofascists,”
tweeted a month before the March 2017 election a photoshopped image
of the parliamentary leader of an opposing party, showing him at a rally
with Muslim protesters holding up banners with messages such as “Islam
will conquer Europe” and “Shariah for The Netherlands.”25 While Dutch
politicians across the spectrum condemned Wilders for this, it kept the
news spotlight on him for several days during a very critical time of the
election, in which his party went on to finish second.
While the uses of social media by antisystem groups in democracies
are diverse and cannot be captured here in their entirety, many rely on
the same mechanisms that democratic groups and repressive regimes
alike use to harness social media’s power. For example, the prolifera-
tion of misinformation across social media follows the same cross-net-
work and cross-platform diffusion logic that enabled protesters in Egypt
to turn their personal and emotional stories of beating and repression
into the gunpowder of revolution. Precisely because social-media posts
spread through weak ties and are presented in the context of powerful
social cues, “fake news” can travel rapidly across social networks with-
out being challenged. Similarly, attention-hacking techniques that au-
thoritarian regimes have used, such as clickbait and manipulated search
results, benefit immensely from rapid diffusion. This process may gain
strength from users’ accidental (as opposed to selective) exposure to
content shared via social media. Such content, even if it is out of line
with users’ beliefs, will in at least some cases rouse their curiosity when
otherwise they might never have looked into the topic.

The Law Awakens: Restricting Technology?

Much as liberation technology created problems for autocracies, the
success of social media has fueled political turmoil in democracies.
Some of this turmoil belongs to the sharp but normal cut-and-thrust
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 55

of freewheeling debate in democratic societies. Some, however, falls

within the ambit of extremism, even violent extremism. Can or should
democratic governments do anything about this, and if so, what? After
the 3 June 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack—it killed eleven (in-
cluding the three attackers), injured 48, and was the third such high-
profile assault in the United Kingdom since March—Home Secretary
Amber Rudd attributed the attack to “radical Islamist terrorists.”26 The
same day, Prime Minister Theresa May called for closer regulation of
the internet in order to “prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism
planning.”27 A few weeks later, looking ahead to the Bundestag election
set for September 2017, the German government passed a law decreeing
heavy fines for social-media companies that fail to remove within 24
hours racist or slanderous (in the words of Justice Minister Heiko Maas,
“obviously illegal”) comments and posts.28
These decisions may test the limits of freedom of expression in dem-
ocratic societies and put forcefully on display an enduring structural
asymmetry between democratic and nondemocratic regimes. While au-
thoritarian regimes can take steps described previously to diffuse dissent
on social media, democratic regimes may be much more constrained: A
democratic state cannot as easily hire trolls, arbitrarily change laws, or
start arresting people who back controversial policy ideas.
The new reality has, however, led to highly controversial measures.
For example, the similarity of the new German law to “opinion-guid-
ance” efforts in autocratic societies leads to troubling normative ques-
tions about whether this regulatory infrastructure could be repurposed
by democratic governments for repression, censorship, and surveillance.
Moreover, the almost immediate adoption of a virtual copy of the Ger-
man law by Vladimir Putin’s Russia led to sharp criticism from civil
society organizations. “When leading democracies devise draconian
legislation,” complained Reporters Without Borders, “they provide re-
pressive regimes with ideas.”29
To further complicate matters, it is unclear whether the outcomes en-
visioned by governments taking such steps are even possible: Tasks that
may seem trivial to many—detecting online bots or trolls, categorizing
content as real or fake news, and deciding what is “obviously illegal”—
are notoriously difficult to implement. What is also unclear is if such ef-
forts will succeed. Fact-checking interventions may induce backlash ef-
fects,30 and terror networks may resort to other platforms on which they
are harder to track. Further, attempts to regulate speech may run into all
sorts of new technical challenges, such as separating citizens with legal
rights from foreign actors—and even foreign intelligence agencies—that
may not be entitled to the same rights, to say nothing of the challenge of
separating humans from evolving forms of artificial intelligence.
To state that these developments pose new challenges for scholars, pol-
icy makers, social-media companies, courts, and political actors would be
56 Journal of Democracy

an understatement. As difficult as it is to answer questions regarding how

democratic governments should monitor or regulate social-media plat-
forms used by terrorist groups, it gets that much harder when we rephrase
the question in terms of groups in democratic societies that appear to be
using social media to take actions that undermine democracy and demo-
cratic norms. Different countries have historically approached the ques-
tion of offline speech in different ways, but is such a country-by-country
approach feasible when the effect of speech is no longer even remotely
constrained by national boundaries? Indeed, the vast majority of social-
media posts (especially outside China and Russia) that are made on any
given day take place via giant multinational companies such as Twitter
and Facebook, and these posts influence the search rankings maintained
by another giant multinational company, Google.
Do companies have a role to play in ensuring that their platforms are
not used for censorship and harassment? Facebook’s hiring of a large
number of content reviewers to address these challenges, and Google’s
implementation of machine learning to help in removing extremist
content, suggest that companies are beginning to acknowledge their
responsibility in fighting the spread of extremist ideas through online
networks.31 How should they react to government requests for data or to
shut down specific accounts? Here the answer may lie in greater trans-
parency in such dealings and in further consultation with civil society.
Finally, is there anything that citizens can do to support online inclu-
sion and democratic deliberation? For example, given the importance
of social cues in the spread of information, should fact-checking one’s
social ties—that is, speaking up when one sees one’s contacts sharing
misinformation—be considered a new responsibility of citizenship?
While these kinds of steps may give way to new forms of interpersonal
backlash (for example, “defriending”), scholars have long argued that
the collaborative environment of social media gives rise to new notions
of citizenship and political engagement. Indeed, some who have stud-
ied the matter are cautiously optimistic that citizens, especially younger
ones, will reject passive information consumption in favor of more criti-
cal and discerning engagement with the world of claims and counter-
claims that stream back and forth online.32
These questions and more suggest how important it is to reflect on the
new responsibilities of governments, corporations, and citizens in a digi-
tal age. Scholars can play a role here. Some of the questions posed above
are normative: Should governments regulate speech online? Yet others are
positive: Can we develop algorithms to identify bots as they evolve over
time? Do attempts to regulate speech online raise or lower support for
democratic norms? Both types of questions pose challenges. Our hope is
that the framework sketched in this essay will prove useful to those both
inside and outside the academy as they wrestle with what the evolving
internet world means for politics, democratic and otherwise.
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 57

NOTES
1. Lev Grossman, “Person of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg,” Time, 15 December 2010,
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183,00.html.

2. Donald Trump, “Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming me
‘Person of the Year’—a great honor!” Twitter, 15 December 2016, https://twitter.com/
realdonaldtrump/status/809384826193276928.

3. Darren Samuelsohn, “Fake News Could Prove Vexing in Mueller Probe,” Po-
litico, 11 July 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/07/11/fake-news-robert-mueller-
trump-240376. On social media and the 2016 U.S. election, see Nathaniel Persily, “The
2016 U.S. Election: Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” Journal of Democracy 28
(April 2017): 63–76. On media manipulation in democracies generally, see Alice Mar-
wick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data &
Society Research Institute, 2017, https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_Me-
diaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf.

4. See David Z. Morris “U.K. Conservatives Want to Dramatically Increase Internet

Regulation,” Fortune, 20 May 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/05/20/u-k-election-internet-
regulation; Catherine Cadell, “China Says Terrorism, Fake News Impel Greater Internet
Curbs,” Reuters, 19 November 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-china-internet-idUSK-
BN13F01K.

5. Blake Hounsell, “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted: Life in the Vanguard of the
New Twitter Proletariat”, Foreign Policy, 20 June 2011, www.foreignpolicy.com/ar-
ticles/2011/06/20/the_revolution_will_be_tweeted; Vyacheslav W. Polonski, “Is Social
Media Destroying Democracy?” Newsweek, 5 August 2016, www.newsweek.com/social-
media-destroying-democracy-487483; Nicholas Carr, “How Social Media Is Ruining
Politics,” Politico, 2 September 2015, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/2016-
election-social-media-ruining-politics-213104.

6. Larry Diamond, “Liberation Technology,” Journal of Democracy 21 (July 2010): 69–83.

7. Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms
2016,” Pew Research Center, 26 May 2016, www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-
across-social-media-platforms-2016; Nic Newman et al., “Reuters Institute Digital News
Report 2016,” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, http://reutersinstitute.poli-
tics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital-News-Report-2016.pdf.

8. Daniela V. Dimitrova et al., “The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge

and Participation in Election Campaigns: Evidence From Panel Data,” Communication
Research 41 (February 2014): 95; Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic,
“Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,” Science, 5 June
2015, 1130; Cristian Vaccari et al., “Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure
to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter,” Social Media +
Society 2 (September 2016): 1–24.

9. Philip N. Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Informa-

tion Technology and Political Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5–8. For
alternative interpretations, see Evgeny Morozov, “Iran: Downside to the ‘Twitter Revo-
lution,’” Dissent 56 (Fall 2009): 10–14; and Sean Aday et al., “Blogs and Bullets: New
Media in Contentious Politics,” U.S. Institute of Peace, September 2010.

10. Robert M. Bond et al., “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and

Political Mobilization,” Nature 489 (September 2012): 295–98.

11. Sandra González-Bailón, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, and Yamir Moreno, “Broad-

casters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion,” American Behavioral Scien-
tist 57 (July 2013): 943–65.
58 Journal of Democracy

12. Pablo Barberá et al., “The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests,”
PLoS ONE 10 (November 2015), http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/
journal.pone.0143611.

13. Evgeny Morozov deserves special credit for noting as early as 2009 that “most au-
thoritarian states are . . . eagerly exploiting cyberspace for their own strategic purposes.”
“Iran: Downside to the ‘Twitter Revolution,’” 12. See also his book The Net Delusion
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2012). Larry Diamond grasped this possibility too, noting that
“authoritarian states such as China, Belarus, and Iran have acquired (and shared) impres-
sive technical capabilities to filter and control the Internet, and to identify and punish
dissenters. Democrats and autocrats now compete to master these technologies. Ultimate-
ly, however, not just technology but political organization and strategy and deep-rooted
normative, social, and economic forces will determine who ‘wins’ the race.” “Liberation
Technology,” 70.

14. This section draws on Margaret Roberts, Censored: Distraction and Diversion
Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018).
See also Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal, and Joshua A. Tucker, “Turning the Virtual Ta-
bles: Government Strategies for Addressing Online Opposition with an Application to
Russia,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming, 2018), for a different but related classifica-
tion scheme based on offline responses, limits on access to online content, and engage-
ment with online content.

15. Committee to Protect Journalists, “2016 Prison Census: 259 Journalists Jailed
Worldwide,” https://cpj.org/imprisoned/2016.php.

16. In her forthcoming book on China’s Great Firewall, Margaret Roberts argues that
for these reasons, fear is problematic for authoritarian governments to use in a widespread
way online. Instead, such regimes often prefer to reserve fear tactics for specific use in
targeting high-profile elites and journalists.

17. Lotus Ruan, Jeffrey Knockel, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata, “We (Can’t) Chat:
‘709 Crackdown’ Discussions Blocked on Weibo and WeChat,” Citizen Lab, 13 April
2017, https://citizenlab.ca/2017/04/we-cant-chat-709-crackdown-discussions-blocked-
on-weibo-and-wechat; Rebecca MacKinnon, “Liberation Technology: China’s Networked
Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 22 (April 2011): 32–46; David Bamman, Bren-
dan O’Connor, and Noah A. Smith, “Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese Social
Media,” First Monday 17 (March 2012), http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3943/3169;
Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows
Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science
Review 107 (May 2013): 326–43; Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts,
“Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant
Observation,” Science, 22 August 2014; Sanovich et al., “Turning the Virtual Tables.”

18. Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin
Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money, special report presented by the Interpreter
(a project of the Institute of Modern Russia, New York), 2014; Rongbin Han, “Defending
the Authoritarian Regime Online: China’s ‘Voluntary Fifty-cent Army,’” China Quarterly
224 (December 2015): 1006; Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How
the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not En-
gaged Argument,” American Political Science Review 111 (August 2017): 484–501; Blake
Andrew Phillip Miller, “Automated Detection of Chinese Government Astroturfers Using
Network and Social Metadata,” working paper shared with authors, 2016.

19. Brendan I. Koerner, “Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War,” Wired, April
2016, www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat; J.M. Berger,
“How ISIS Games Twitter,” Atlantic, 16 June 2014, www.theatlantic.com/international/
archive/2014/06/isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856; although see Alexan-
dra Siegel and Joshua A. Tucker, “The Islamic State’s Information Warfare: Measuring
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá 59

the Success of ISIS’ Online Strategy,” Journal of Language and Politics (forthcoming),
which argues that although pro-ISIS content spreads globally and remains on message, it
is far less prolific than anti-ISIS content.

20. Marwick and Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” 1.

21. See for example Emily Tamkin, “French Intelligence Agency Braces for Rus-
sian Bots to Back Le Pen,” Foreign Policy, 8 February 2017, http://foreignpolicy.
com/2017/02/08/french-intelligence-agency-braces-for-russian-bots-to-back-le-pen; Pe-
ter Stone and Greg Gordon, “FBI’s Russian-Influence Probe Includes a Look at Breitbart,
InfoWars News Sites,” McClatchy, 20 March 2017, www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-
government/white-house/article139695453.html; Emilio Ferrara et al., “The Rise of Social
Bots,” Communications of the ACM 59 (July 2016): 96–104.

22. Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2014).

23. Yannis Theocharis et al., “A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets: The Consequenc-
es of Citizens’ Uncivil Twitter Use When Interacting With Party Candidates,” Journal of
Communication 66 (December 2016): 1007–31.

24. Ben Knight, “Pegida Head Lutz Bachmann Reinstated After Furore over Hitler
Moustache Photo,” Guardian, 23 February 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/
feb/23/pegida-head-lutz-bachmann-reinstated-hitler-moustache-photo.

25. Adam Taylor, “Dutch Far Right Leader Geert Wilders Tweets a Fake Image of
a Rival with a ‘Shariah for the Netherlands’ Sign,” Washington Post, 6 February 2017,
www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/06/dutch-far-right-leader-geert-
wilders-tweets-a-fake-image-of-a-rival-with-a-shariah-for-the-netherlands-sign.

26. “UK’s Rudd Says London Attackers Probably ‘Radical Islamist Terrorists,’” Re-
uters, 4 June 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-security-rudd-idUSKBN18V0JC.

27. Charles Riley, “Theresa May: Internet Must Be Regulated to Prevent Terrorism,”
CNN, 4 June 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/04/technology/social-media-terrorism-
extremism-london/index.html.

28. “Germany Approves Plans to Fine Social Media Firms up to €50m,” Guardian, 30
June 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/30/germany-approves-plans-to-fine-
social-media-firms-up-to-50m.

29. Reporters Without Borders, “Russian Bill Is a Copy-and-Paste of Germany’s

Hate Speech Law,” 19 July 2017, https://rsf.org/en/news/russian-bill-copy-and-paste-
germanys-hate-speech-law.

30. See for example the #CNNBlackmail reaction to CNN’s identification of the creator
of a .gif tweeted by President Trump that used footage from professional wrestling to show
Trump physically attacking an opponent with the CNN logo overlaid on his head; e.g., Paul
Joseph Watson, “Did CNN just re-unite the alt-right & the new right in a common cause?”
Twitter, 5 July 2017, https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/882652805437304832.

31. See as well Facebook’s recent announcement regarding ad buys from inauthen-
tic accounts linked to Russia during the U.S. presidential campaign: https://newsroom.
fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-update.

32. Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, eds., DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social
Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).