Online Harassment in Authoritarian and Semi-democratic States

Existing literature on online safety issues in authoritarian and semi-democratic states has focused on state-facilitated harms.This special issue expands on this work by examining online harassment by individuals who may have connections to the state but deliberately obscure these ties.Restrictions on press freedom and limited transparency in government decision-making processes mean individuals encounter greater challenges in making sense of coordinated online harms and attributing these activities to the responsible parties.However, given that authoritarian rule fundamentally relies on repression, determining whether state actors are orchestrating these activities holds significant implications for their targets.Articles in this issue make valuable contributions to this emerging field of research by describing the mechanics of pro-government harassment campaigns in non-democratic contexts. A Scarcity of Research on State-Society Coordination for Online HarassmentIn non-democratic regimes, the boundary between state and non-state activities is generally fuzzier compared to democratic systems, given the regime's tighter control and deeper penetration into society (Linz 2000; Scott 1990; Wedeen 1998).For example, previous research has shown that autocrats mobilize the domestic public to fabricate pro-regime social media posts with the goal of crowding out online dissent (Han 2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017).While this work has investigated how states secretly work with societal groups for disinformation campaigns, less attention has been paid to the mechanics of coordinated online harassment and the implications for the political attitudes and behavior of those targeted.A handful of studies assess the systematic effect of state repression on online dissent (Esberg and Siegel 2023; Hobbs and Roberts 2018), but little research has delved into how dissidents experiencing online harms conceptualize their experience.Importantly, we lack insight into how the targets of coordinated harassment assess the role of state actors in their experiences, which may shape how they respond to such adversities.Using in-depth interviews with targets of coordinated online harassment under authoritarian or semi-democratic rule, articles in this special issue illuminate