Authoritarian Populism and the Internet: Exploring and explaining this global political trend with cross-national comparative research

This presentation will introduce a framework for understanding worldwide trends in (digitally-mediated) politics, combining theories of authoritarian populism and populist authoritarianism. Convergence in the discourses of political power holders in both democratic and authoritarian states will be discussed through comparisons of Trump in the US and Xi in China and their respective social media propaganda campaigns. The way in which state and technology interface and the way in which the structures and affordances of commercial social media facilitate these political trends will be outlined, with reference to Twitter in the US and Weibo in China. Next, the way in which state and political entities leverage these structures and affordances will be demonstrated. Finally, the nature of social media ecosystems within authoritarian populist politics in democratic states will be discussed with reference to studies of the 2019 Indian General Election and the 2020 anti-COVID and BLM movements in the US.