Democracy and Internet Control: Theory and Evidence from Transparency Reports

Abstract

Internet control has long been considered a feature of authoritarian regimes alone. Drawing data from Google and Twitter transparency reports, we observe that democratic countries remove an equal amount of content as their authoritarian counterparts. The distinction between the two regimes lies not in the quantity but in the method of content removal. Democracy refrains from government takedown and instead delegates the removal right to the users. This paper conjectures that politicians' reputation concern is the key to understanding this phenomenon. To that end, we develop a political agency model that explains the stylized facts and derives testable hypotheses. Using the timing of elections as a natural experiment, we provide supporting evidence that the takedown requests from democratic governments decreased significantly as the election approached. This reputation effect is not observed in authoritarian regimes or other types of requests.