Innovations in communication and media technology can have profound political implications. An oft-cited example is the printing press, which helped Martin Luther and his supporters spread the Protestant Reformation in Europe. According to one study, cities with at least one printing press by the year 1500 AD were roughly 50 per cent more likely to have officially adopted Protestantism thirty years later. Martin Luther himself described printing as “God’s highest and ultimate gift of grace by which He would have His Gospel carried forward.”
The degree of transformation of European politics in the wake of the Reformation would be difficult to exaggerate. The printing press helped foster the political and economic rise of literate Protestants over traditional elites. With such political shifts came instability and even violent conflicts, including peasant rebellions, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Thirty Years’ War.
In the 20th century and beyond, new technologies have continued to have transformative effects on politics. The rise of broadcast radio networks facilitated Adolf Hitler’s direct communication with his followers (and did the same for the US populist Huey Long). The audio cassette player and photocopier assisted Iranian revolutionaries by allowing them to evade the Shah’s censors. Arguably, the arrival of the fax machine helped hasten the USSR’s demise, by providing Soviet dissidents with tools to evade the regime’s elaborate system for listening in on telephone calls.
In recent years, widespread penetration of mobile devices that can broadcast text messages has transformed the political power of mass protests. To control crowds, authorities seek to place police and barriers in strategic locations, ideally in advance of a protest. Broadcast text messages can enable huge crowds to change tactics on the fly, making it all but impossible for police to keep protestors under control without resorting to deadly force. “Flash mob” protests have played a role in the toppling of governments in the Philippines in 2001; Georgia in 2003; Ukraine in 2004-5; Kyrgyzstan in 2005; and Thailand in 2006 – and that is surely only a partial list.
There is a tendency to treat recent political trends fostered in part by social media as problems to be solved through better laws or improved business practices. For instance, problems such as “fake news” or “online disinformation campaigns” waged by hostile foreign powers are the subject of much political discussion. (Such side effects of technological innovation are not new: the invention of the printing press was associated with a surge in anti-Semitic propaganda.) It is also possible, however, that recent disruptive events in politics are symptoms of broader shifts that social media will amplify – shifts that may involve fundamental changes to political systems, or to who has political power in society. These shifts may be permanent and profound (at least until the next technological innovation comes along).
For instance, activist politics involves collective action via pressure campaigns or mass protests. Key barriers to such action are the difficulties of forming group social identities, setting out collective goals, and convincing people that their individual political actions can be effective.
It is possible that social media, which is in part a tool for forming new social groups, has made activist politics dramatically more effective. It is also possible that social media has empowered social groups that traditionally avoided political activism because of social discrimination, geographical dispersion, or a lack of political education.
Social media may be particularly effective because of the use of images and video, addressing communities that may have been difficult to mobilize via the printed word. Images and video may also be more effective at provoking emotive responses, which some research has indicated is associated with an increased likelihood of political action. In addition, social media arguably represent a step change among media technologies in terms of speed, scalability, and transnational communication – qualities that appear to be reflected in the growing speed, scale and transnational transmission of mass unrest.
Certainly, protest movements that have been at least partly enabled by new technologies have been associated with property damage losses that have, in some countries, reached an unprecedented scale (see chart).
Increasing penetration of new mobile and communication technologies has been associated with a dramatic increase in the number of anti-government protests in developing countries occurring annually (see chart). While #metoo and #blacklivesmatter campaigns have spread from North America and Western Europe to the emerging world, there are also numerous home-grown online pressure campaigns in developing countries. Civil society actors routinely use social media to spread content that fuels anti-government sentiment, to organize demonstrations and to document and thereby amplify protest actions.
For instance:
In Algeria, news of anti-government demonstrations in the Berber-majority Kabylie region in early 2019 (organized through word-of-mouth and poster campaigns) spread online and prompted year-long protests, precipitating long-serving President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s ouster. In September 2019, Egypt saw protests after videos posted to social media by a former government contractor living in exile alleged widespread corruption.
Pressure on Israeli authorities to act in regard to recent murders of Arab Israelis was orchestrated in part through the online campaign #ArabLivesMatter, complaining of police negligence. In an unprecedented move in October 2021, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s governing coalition authorized Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic terrorism agency, to help fight violent crime in the Arab Israeli sector.
In 2020 alone, hashtag activism fueled campaigns in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Namibia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The #EndSars movement seeking to put an end to police violence in Nigeria has been one of the largest protest movements on the continent to date. The movement was associated with relentless street protests that forced the Nigerian government to disband the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and set up a judicial probe to investigate alleged police abuses.
In Indonesia, demonstrations organized through social media have highlighted concerns about labor rights in the government’s new Omnibus Law. In Malaysia and the Philippines, recent protests orchestrated online focused on the two governments’ handling of the pandemic. In Vietnam, issues of freedom of speech and the environmental impact of infrastructure programs frequently feed online protest.
Social media was used to foment nationwide street protests in Cuba in July 2020. While the initial protest took place in a small town outside Havana, video recordings made with mobile phones spread rapidly on social media, triggering copycat events across the country, with no specific leadership or organizational structure.
In Nepal in June 2020, a group launched a social media movement criticizing the government's handling of the pandemic; the movement went viral. Their campaign later expanded to criticize a wider range of domestic policies. Youth-led peaceful protests led the government to change policy. In Bangladesh in 2018, students led intense social media campaigns against quotas for government jobs, forcing the government to change course. Indian netizens posted millions of anti-China posts calling for a boycott of Chinese products after a border clash in June 2020.
A new trend in the emerging world is the growth of transnational activist movements. For the first time, pro-democracy activists in different Asian countries are joining a loose cross-border movement in the form of the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA). The “milk tea” in the MTA is a reference to the cultural tradition of adding milk to tea in the three founding locations of the network: Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand.
The movement originated in early 2020 with the protests in Hong Kong against pro-Beijing politicians. The Alliance has become particularly important to the resistance movement in Myanmar, where ongoing conflict has thrust the country into isolation. Environmental activists in South-east Asia, particularly in Thailand, are beginning to use the Alliance to build online resistance to Chinese dams on the Mekong River.
The dispersed online nature of the MTA network makes it more difficult to control. Following the coup in Myanmar, seemingly spontaneous street protests arose in Bangkok, Taipei and Melbourne, while activists in Indonesia and Malaysia launched media campaigns against the junta. There is some evidence that protest movements linked through the MTA are modelling their organizational methods on one another. For example, Thai protest leaders have adopted techniques from the Hong Kong demonstrations that set the time and place for protests by allowing followers to “vote” with coded emojis.
Some emerging market governments have sought to deal with the growing role played by new technologies in political activism by shutting down on the internet, particularly around election times (see charts). Government responses to online activism have depended on the country’s level of authoritarianism, with crackdowns ranging from temporary shutdowns to tighter regulations on online content and corporate operations. Permanent bans have been rare aside from exceptional cases such as Iran and Myanmar.
Middle Eastern states have sought to manage perceived political threats by targeting opposition figures’ use of new technologies, for instance with new laws governing online content, euphemistically dubbed “anti-cybercrime” legislation. More targeted approaches include hacking activists’ accounts or inundating site administrators with fraudulent complaints against specific users, leading to the temporary suspension of their accounts.
The ongoing standoff between Turkey and social media giants could be a test case for handling social media. Ankara in 2020 passed a law requiring social media companies to establish representative offices in Turkey and comply with requests for data and content removal. Thus far, some major US social media companies have refused, despite fines and the threat of throttling. If successful, Turkey’s approach is likely to be emulated.
Governments in Africa, meanwhile, have responded with different measures to curtail mobilisation. Since late 2020, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Senegal, Nigeria, Uganda, Niger and the DRC have shut down online platforms or the internet because of specific protests or elections, while South Africa is tracking activists’ cellphones. Internet and telecommunication services have suffered wholesale shutdowns across Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda.
Such restrictions are easier to implement in emerging market countries that have full control of digital infrastructure, such as in Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. In countries with a diverse telecommunications landscape and private internet service providers, imposing bans and shutdowns is less straightforward. In a potentially dangerous turning point, shutdowns are no longer only used by authoritarian governments, but have recently been implemented in more open democracies such as Senegal.
South-east Asia, meanwhile, has led the world in its promulgation of anti-fake news regulations, particularly during the pandemic. The definition of “fake news” is broad and vague in these laws, often sufficient to stretch to any criticism of the government. In general, because of the popularity of social media in the region, governments have been more likely to go after telecoms companies rather than social media platforms (although there are exceptions). New regulations on telecoms, particularly foreign companies, sometimes require local storage of data or, more overtly, government access to data on users.
In South Asia, the Indian government is directly pressuring social media firms to censor content, comply with government demands for data on some users, and open local offices. In contrast to Turkey, some social media firms have agreed to comply, perhaps because of the large size of the Indian market. The Indian government also routinely resorts to internet shutdowns, especially in Kashmir. In Bangladesh, 443 people had been arrested as of July 2021 for posting on social media what the government called false and offensive content under the Digital Security Act 2018.
Meanwhile, some governments have sought to leverage the political power of social media to their own advantage. For instance, Middle Eastern governments (and, in Iraq and Lebanon, paramilitary groups) have established networks of fake accounts that harass rivals and flood social media with favourable or irrelevant content. At least 13 different African governments used “industrialized disinformation” campaigns in efforts to sway domestic public opinion in 2020; this trend is likely to spread and accelerate in the coming years.
These efforts notwithstanding, the political role of new technologies appears likely only to grow, with the rise of sustained transnational activist alliances (such as the MTA) as one example. As with the printing press, these new technologies may in some cases transform politics and empower marginalized groups, but the resulting pressures could also lead to intensified political conflicts.
