authoritarian

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The influence of online vote advice tools designed to help voters discover more about candidates is limited when elections are affected by authoritarianism, a recent study shows. Voting advice applications offer voters nonpartisan information about political parties, candidates, and policy issues. The research shows…

Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic: Silicon Valley's powerful companies claim to embrace Enlightenment values, but instead are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal, and authoritarian technocracy — If you had to capture Silicon Valley's dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg … Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic: Silicon Valley's powerful companies claim to embrace Enlightenment values, but instead are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal, and authoritarian…

Relationships between authoritarian predispositions, media attention, and identifying issues as threats. Credit: Politics and the Life Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1017/pls.2023.12 Those with authoritarian political views are more likely to be concerned about terrorism and border control than a future new health pandemic, new research shows. …

REGIME TYPES BY NUMBER OF COUNTRIES AND SHARE OF POPULATION, 1972–2022. The number of countries (left panel) and the share of the world’s population (right panel) by regime type. Naturally, some uncertainty remains about the exact regime classification of some countries in some years. Credit: DEMOCRACY REPORT 2023 Defiance in the Face of Autocratization (2023). For the first time in two decades, there are more closed…

Despite President Biden’s assurances at Wednesday’s United Nations meeting that the US is not seeking a new cold war, one is brewing between the world’s autocracies and democracies—and technology is fueling it. Late last week, Iran, Turkey, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries took steps toward becoming full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an economic and political alliance led by the authoritarian regimes of China and Russia. The majority of SCO member countries, as well as other…

Beyond the SCO, Venezuela’s autocratic regime announced in 2017 a smart identification card for its citizens that aggregated employment, voting, and medical information with the help of the Chinese telecom company ZTE. And Huawei, another Chinese telecom corporation, boasts a global network of 700 localities with its smart city technology, according to the company’s 2021 annual report. This is up from 2015, when the company had about 150 international contracts in cities. Chinese surveillance platforms used for policing…

WASHINGTON — A week after prominent technologists publicly slammed crypto for being too risky and unproven in a letter to Congress, human rights advocates from around the world have sent a rebuttal to U.S. lawmakers defending digital assets for the access they provide to people in countries where "local currencies are collapsing, broken, or cut off from the outside world."Some 21 human rights supporters from 20 different countries said in the letter that they've relied on bitcoin and stablecoins, which allow the trading…

Citizens in authoritarian regimes worldwide are managing to evade internet controls in an attempt to get uncensored information. Russians are using virtual private networks to circumvent internet crackdowns following the invasion of Ukraine. In North Korea, some users can sidestep government restrictions on smartphones. It’s part of a growing struggle between many governments and their citizens to control information flowing through the internet. “Mobile users would have to use the same techniques as desktop users,…