A difficult test for hard propaganda: Evidence from a choice experiment in Venezuela

Propaganda plays a key role in maintaining power in authoritarian regimes. Previous research finds that overt, crude, and heavy-handed messaging, so-called hard propaganda, can be used to effectively convey government strength and deter citizens from joining anti-regime protests in relatively stable autocratic regimes like China. Yet, it is unclear if this is also true in more contested and unstable autocratic contexts. In these settings, citizens are more likely to question such messaging and prior beliefs of government strength vary more widely. We explore the perception of hard propaganda in one such difficult test case for hard propaganda: the crisis-ridden Maduro regime in Venezuela. We measure perceptions of hard propaganda among the public using an online survey that featured a choice experiment in which respondents chose between and rated different propaganda images against more neutral political communication. Our results show that respondents perceived hard propaganda images as stronger compared to neutral political communication. This holds true – contrary to our pre-registered expectations – regardless of whether respondents overall perceived the government as strong or weak. Moreover, respondents reported a lower willingness to join anti-government protests but, at the same time, had a greater motivation to challenge the regime. These results support and extend prior findings on the effectiveness of hard propaganda in deterring anti-regime activities to the case of contested and unstable autocracies. But they also suggest that this kind of messaging erodes regime legitimacy providing the first evidence outside of the Chinese case of the pathology of hard propaganda

Kolumbien - den Frieden gewinnen

Am 23. September 2015 unterzeichneten die kolumbianische Regierung und die Guerillagruppe FARC in Havanna ein Abkommen zur Etablierung einer "Sondergerichtsbarkeit für den Frieden". Damit rücken ein umfassendes Friedensabkommen und die Beendigung des Bürgerkriegs in greifbare Nähe. Das Friedensabkommen und seine Umsetzung müssen den ausgeprägten regionalen Unterschieden in Kolumbien Rechnung tragen. Auch wenn die Gewalt immer wieder die großen Städte erreichte, fand der Krieg vor allem im ländlichen Raum statt. Je nach Präsenz und Verankerung nichtstaatlicher Gewaltakteure sind die Herausforderungen für den Friedensprozess sehr unterschiedlich. Auch die Verfügbarkeit zentraler Ressourcen wie Drogen oder Land spielt eine wichtige Rolle. Das Abkommen zur "Sondergerichtsbarkeit für den Frieden" knüpft rechtlich und inhaltlich eng an vergleichbare Regelungen der Vergangenheit an. Juristisches Neuland ist die zentrale Rolle der Entschädigung der Opfer durch die Täter. Die Umsetzbarkeit wird von der Bewertung kolumbianischer und internationaler Gerichte abhängen. In den letzten Dekaden wurden in Kolumbien zahlreiche Reformen eingeleitet, um den strukturellen Ursachen der Gewalt zu begegnen. Dabei hat sich vor allem die Dezentralisierung als sehr ambivalent erwiesen. Die Aufwertung der Kommunen trug dazu bei, dass die bewaffneten Gruppen starkes Interesse an deren Kontrolle entwickelten. Über sechs Millionen Kolumbianerinnen und Kolumbianer sind intern Vertriebene und haben als Folge der Gewalt all ihr Hab und Gut verloren. Zudem hat der wirtschaftliche Wandel die traditionelle Landwirtschaft in vielen Regionen verdrängt. Diese Entwicklungen lassen sich auch nach Beendigung des Krieges nicht zurückdrehen. Die zentrale Herausforderung der nächsten Monate besteht darin, den Pakt zwischen Regierung und FARC in einen breiten gesellschaftlichen Konsens über die Zukunft des Landes zu übertragen. Während die Verhandlungen international viel Zustimmung erfahren haben, bleibt die öffentliche Meinung in Kolumbien tief gespalten

At Home and Abroad: The Use of Denial-of-service Attacks during Elections in Nondemocratic Regimes

In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government’s authority. We analyze these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that serve as hosts for news websites from this country.publishe

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

Hot topics: Denial-of-Service attacks on news websites in autocracies

Most authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools

Political Denial-of-Service Attacks

Replication data for Denial-of-Service Attacks Project

Digital Retaliation? Denial-of-Service Attacks after Sanction Events

Conventional wisdom expects to see a rise in cyber activities around aggressive foreign policy events. In this article, I test this claim by investigating whether sanctions lead to an increase in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks using new data on DoS attacks measured from Internet traffic. Exploring the development of DoS attacks around sanctions imposed against Russia in 2014 indeed shows an increase of DoS attacks against several sanction sender states. Extending this case study to a systematic analysis, including all sanction threats and impositions made by the United States and the European Union between 2008 and 2016, shows no apparent patterns. When I exclusively consider sanctions against technologically advanced countries, however, the frequency of attacks rises systematically against the United States. It thus appears that states do not always have to expect a digital retaliation after aggressive foreign policies. Nevertheless, sanctioning countries may have to anticipate an increase in DoS attacks when their governments impose sanctions against technologically advanced countries

Censor & Contend : The Use of Denial-of-Service Attacks in Autocracies

In recent years, cyberwarfare has been a hotly debated issue. In this dissertation, I investigate the use of one particular type of cyberattacks: Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. These relatively simple attacks overload servers with Internet data traffic, making them temporally not reachable. Most of the public and academic attention has been on their use during interstate conflicts. Even so, in this dissertation, I show that in autocracies domestic reasons are primarily responsible for the political use of DoS attacks.To explain the use of DoS attacks, I connect literature from three research fields: social movements, autocratic politics, and international relations. From this, I develop two main theoretical mechanisms for the political use of DoS attacks in autocracies. The latter are employed to censor threatening websites or to contend governmental policies of the own or other states. I rely on two new data sources that measure DoS attacks. The first comes from the Center for Advanced Internet Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego, measuring DoS attacks from Internet traffic data. The second is an own measurement for news websites in several authoritarian countries, where I query the websites' status codes to infer DoS attacks. Both the theoretical framework and new data sources represent a new and previously absent contribution to the study of cyberattacks.In the first paper, which was jointly written with Nils B. Weidmann, Margaret E. Roberts, Mattijs Jonker, Alistair King, and Alberto Dainotti, the goal is to explore whether politically domestic events increase the likelihood of DoS attacks. We investigate whether the number of DoS attacks increases during election periods from 2008 -- 2016 worldwide. We expect that the frequency of DoS attacks rises especially in autocracies as here both governments and activists have incentives to employ them. Using the data on DoS attacks provided by CAIDA, we show that election periods in autocracies are positively associated with the number of DoS attacks. However, this increase is not necessarily visible on the autocracy itself but on foreign servers where country-related newspapers are hosted. In conclusion, our study suggests that authoritarian governments use DoS attacks to export censorship beyond their borders and attack servers abroad.In the second paper, I investigate the censorship function of DoS attacks in greater detail and explore the reasons and timing for attacks on websites. For this, I monitor several news websites in Venezuela from November 2017 to June 2018. I argue that DoS attacks target news websites to censor sensitive information temporally, but also to send repressive signals to these media outlets. In the empirical part, I investigate these mechanisms by looking at whether reporting on specific news topics increase the likelihood of DoS attacks in the short- and medium-term. Since it is a priori unknown what news are sensitive, I employ topic modeling approaches to determine topics Venezuelan news websites report on. The results show evidence for both mechanisms. However, the use of DoS attacks on news websites as a repressive tool appears to be more pronounced.In the third paper, I revisit the claim by many pundits about a cyberwar between nations and investigate a potential coercive use of DoS attacks. In this paper, I focus on liberal sanctions, where one can expect a digital response by targeted states. I propose two mechanisms of why this may be the case. First, states could respond to both sanction threats and impositions with DoS attacks to achieve concessions by the sender state. Second, governments and/or groups within targeted countries may launch DoS attacks to signal discontent. For the empirical part, I again use the data provided by CAIDA and time series models. The results do not show an increase of DoS attacks against sender countries after sanction threats, and, only in a few cases, a significant increase after sanction impositions. These results question the use of DoS attacks as a widely employed coercive tool for interstate conflict. As supported by an additional case study, it is rather activists or patriotic hacking groups that may use them as a contentious response in this context.In conclusion, my dissertation makes at least three important contributions to the previous literature. First, I show that DoS attacks are used in autocracies for political reasons and that especially domestic events appear to trigger them. Second, I develop theoretical explanations for why and when certain actors employ DoS attacks in autocracies, finding primarily evidence for a censorship use of DoS attacks. Finally, I use two new measurements of DoS attacks, allowing to conduct more accurate empirical analyses and to get a more comprehensive picture of cyber activities.publishe

Online repression and tactical evasion: evidence from the 2020 Day of Anger protests in Egypt

Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this paper, we explore how users adjust to these restrictions. To do so, we analyze 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. Compared to neutral users, regime opponents are more likely to issue calls for offline protests using new or dedicated accounts that contain no personal information. Users are also more likely to delete tweets calling for mobilization ex-post in a bid to conceal their activism. We find weaker evidence suggesting that regime opponents try to evade laws targeting critical accounts with over 5,000 followers. The findings illustrate how activists in autocracies use social media to mobilize street-level contention while attempting to mitigate the risk of state repression

Online repression and tactical evasion: evidence from the 2020 Day of Anger protests in Egypt

Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this article, we explore how users adjust to these restrictions. To do so, we analyse 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. Compared to neutral users, regime opponents are more likely to issue calls for offline protests using new or dedicated accounts that contain no personal information. Users are also more likely to delete tweets calling for mobilization ex-post in a bid to conceal their activism. We find weaker evidence suggesting that regime opponents try to evade laws targeting critical accounts with over 5000 followers. The findings illustrate how activists in autocracies use social media to mobilize street-level contention while attempting to mitigate the risk of state repression.</p