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should I say that?

The study’s main takeaway: “Be bold. It is the thing that slows down authoritarian creep.”

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Freedom of speech is a foundational principle of healthy democracies and hence a primary target for aspiring authoritarians, who typically try to squash dissent. There is a point where the threat from authorities is sufficiently severe that a population will self-censor rather than risk punishment. Social media has complicated matters, blurring traditional boundaries between public and private speech, while new technologies such as facial recognition and moderation algorithms give authoritarians powerful new tools.

Researchers explored the nuanced dynamics of how people balance their desire to speak out vs their fear of punishment in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors had previously worked together on a model of political polarization, a project that wrapped up right around the time the social media space was experiencing significant changes in the ways different platforms were handling moderation. Some adopted a decidedly hands-off approach with little to no moderation. Weibo, on the other hand, began releasing the IP addresses of people who posted objectionable commentary, essentially making them targets.

“We were seeing a lot of experimentation in the social media space, so this study started as a question,” co-author Joshua Daymude of Arizona State University told Ars. “Why are these companies doing such dramatically different things, if ostensibly they’re all social media companies and they all want to be profitable and have similar goals? Why are some going one way and others going another?”

Daymude and his co-authors also noticed similar dynamics at the nation-state level in terms of surveillance, monitoring, and moderation. “Russia, for the longest time, was very legalistic: ‘Let’s enumerate every bad thing we can think of so that if you do anything even remotely close, we can get you on one of these statutes that we’ve invented,’” said Daymude. “China was the opposite. They refused to tell you where the red line was. They just said, ‘Behave yourself or else.’ There’s a famous essay that calls this ‘The Anaconda in the Chandelier’: this scary thing that might fall on you at any moment so you behave yourself.”

The US has adopted more of a middle ground approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they wanted to do. Daymude and his co-authors wanted to investigate these markedly different approaches. So they developed a computational agent-based simulation that modeled how individuals navigate between wanting to express dissent versus fear of punishment. The model also incorporates how an authority adjusts its surveillance and its policies to minimize dissent at the lowest possible cost of enforcement.