Messaging Apps: A Rising Tool for Informational Autocrats

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.