Global Patterns of Digital Repression
This chapter presents quantitative data to explain the main arguments of the book. Specifically, it provides pooled, cross-national, time-series data to describe global patterns of digital repression, and it uses that data to develop and validate two composite indexes: a latent construct of digital repression and a latent construct of digital repression capacity. It discusses overall findings from the digital repression index—the relationship between regime type and digital repression, highest- and lowest-performing countries, as well as outliers. It also compares digital repression enactment to capacity, and investigates differences between autocracies and democracies. Finally, it analyzes individual components of digital repression—social media surveillance, online censorship, social manipulation and disinformation, Internet shutdowns, and arrests of online users for political content—and provide explanations for authoritarian and democratic use.