Segment and rule: Modern censorship in authoritarian regimes

Kun Heo and Antoine Zerbini

No 2024-04, Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)

Abstract: We analyze the incentives of authoritarian regimes to segment access to censored content through technology. Citizens choose whether to pay to access censored online content at a cost fixed by the regime: the firewall. A low firewall segments access and generates more compliance than full censorship – a high firewall – ever could. Regime opponents self-select into consuming censored content, and comply conditional on positive independent reporting. Regime supporters exclusively consume state propaganda, which secures their compliance. This segment-and-rule strategy can be engineered by making local news outlets uninformative, or by affecting the intrinsic benefit from access.

Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv and nep-mic
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