Lisa Garbe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), presents her research on the consequences of sudden restrictions on internet access for mobilization. This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for International Security.
Governments around the world frequently restrict access to information, especially during times of political contention such as elections or social unrest. While political scientists have extensively researched the impact of increased internet access and, in particular, access to social media on protest behavior, there remains uncertainty regarding the consequences of a sudden loss of internet access on mobilization. This paper systematically examines how online censorship influences offline protest behavior using a comprehensive dataset from Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage covering 26 authoritarian African countries from 2017 to 2021. To assess the impact of sudden censorship events during politically contentious periods, we employ a differences-in-differences approach with multiple time periods, analyzing how protest behavior is affected in the days and weeks following such events. Preliminary findings suggest that censorship alone does not directly impact protest behavior. Instead, the effect of censorship on protest behavior is conditioned by the number of individuals able to bypass censorship. In summary, this paper introduces an innovative method for quantifying various types of online censorship and offers a systematic evaluation of their consequences for offline mobilization.
Speaker
Lisa Garbe is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institutions and Political Inequality unit at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) in Berlin, Germany. Her research projects explore how digitalization affects core democratic institutions such as elections and shape government-citizen relationships. She is interested in both the intended consequences of government efforts to control internet access, such as censorship or shutdowns, and the unintended repercussions of government digitalization initiatives, including biometric identification systems. Her work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Organizations, and PLOS ONE, among others. Lisa obtained her PhD in Political Science at the University of St.Gallen in 2021.
