Hijacking the calls for online accountability is part of the authoritarian playbook
By Janet Heard, CINIA Communications Practitioner.
Vigilance is required in the battle against disinformation and online abuses because authoritarian regimes stand ready to respond with crackdowns that serve their own interests.
The delicate balancing act of ensuring accountability, without inviting an authoritarian backlash, was among the issues discussed by delegates from more than 20 organisations at a recent information integrity workshop in Stellenbosch, hosted by the Centre for Information Integrity in Africa (CINIA) at Stellenbosch University and supported by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
One of the delegates, social scientist Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, a lead researcher on digital repression and online influence operations, said in a later interview that digital authoritarianism relies on two sides of the same coin. “On the one hand, there is information control, and on the other, there is information manipulation. This is why you see many disinformation campaigns around the world supported by government actors.”
It was also why authoritarian regimes weaponised regulations by implementing and applying them selectively to silence their critics, as a form of Lawfare.
Citing an example in Thailand, Sombatpoonsiri said that the Computer Crimes Act (2007), amended in 2017, was ostensibly designed to address proliferating computer-related abuses, including disinformation.
The law targets hacking, online fraud, data interference, and online pornography. “But over the past 20 years, it has been used to target critics of the government. When it comes to political speech online, the law is being exploited to control information, to limit dissent,” said Sombatpoonsiri, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg and assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.
“Like many authoritarian governments, this law is basically a copy and paste of Western laws, including the U.S. Computer Fraud (enacted in 1986) and Abuse Act and the European Union’s Convention on Cybercrime (enforced in 2004). The problem is not in the content, the text, of the law, but that it is taking place in the absence of the rule of law, so the law is applied selectively.”
Thailand’s digital conduct law was amended by the Junta-led government in 2017 to expand state powers over online expression, drawing sharp criticism from human rights activists who said the ability to prosecute for “false” and “distorted” information was abused to target activists and further restrict free speech, enforce surveillance and censorship.
For the past two decades, Human Rights Watch and others have repeatedly raised concerns that Thai authorities, private companies, and individuals often retaliate against those reporting alleged human rights violations by filing defamation lawsuits, accusing activists and victims of making false statements.
Despite Thailand’s return to civilian government since 2023, the weaponized use of CCA persists. The legal abusers have diversified beyond state actors, with career politicians and predatory private firms increasingly filing defamation complaints against critics of their economic extractivism.
This pattern of Lawfare is repeated by other authoritarian governments, some of which were explored during the five-day-workshop in Stellenbosch.
Dr. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri – Supplied.
Earlier Africa Check research on 31 laws and regulations addressing “false information” in 11 African countries revealed a troubling pattern of censorship: 10 penalize it without requiring evidence of harm or risk. Six tie penalties to vague harms — like “annoying” ministers. These arbitrary measures disproportionately target opposition politicians and journalists, not those who create and spread misinformation, according to Africa Check’s study.
In highlighting the challenge of striking a balance between the very real problem of online abuse and safeguarding freedom of expression, Sombatpoonsiri said: “The rule of law is so important. It has to be fair. And it has to be applied across the board, even when the perpetrators are powerful people. But at the same time, the law has to be based on the constitutional rights of the citizens when it comes to freedom of expression.”
Sombatpoonsiri, who has spent time in Germany, cited a recent controversy around a resolution passed by the Bundestag that excluded anti-semitic speech from Freedom of Expression. First proposed in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on 7 October, 2023, the resolution elicited sharp criticism from critics who cautioned that it reinforced a trend of self-censorship and conflated legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism to defend Zionists, not Jewish people.
“It’s very political right now, a tricky area, but it’s our job to find a balance, to find solutions.”
Sombatpoonsiri, whose book A Thousand Cuts: Digital Repression and Pro-Democracy movements in Thailand, is soon to be released, shows how Thai dissidents were targeted by the government’s sweeping programme of technological suppression. Smear campaigns were orchestrated to discredit young activists, laws were weaponized to criminalize their activities, and surveillance technologies were deployed to keep tabs on them.
Globally, what concerned her most at this juncture was the marriage between political power and profit-driven Big Tech, which was headquartered in the United States. “This is a turning point in our messy digital landscape, where the power to determine what is allowed and what is disallowed can be determined by this relationship.”
Sombatpoonsiri has led research projects in Thailand, Southeast Asia, and Europe (including Serbia and Germany). Current research projects include Digital Authoritarianism through Lawfare in Asia (DiAL) at the German Institute for Global Area Studies and two at Chulalongkorn University — the Southern-Led Approaches to Democratic Resilience: Asia (also supported by the IDRC), and Online Influence Operations in Southeast Asia.
The multi-disciplinary IDRC–CINIA gathering kick-started a three-year collaborative project to strengthen information integrity in the region.
Read more about the IDRC – CINIA project here:
What keeps you awake at night? A shared journey into the toxic digital ecosystem
Digital harms demand Global South-led alternatives
CINIA convenes IDRC partner’s summit to strengthen information integrity in the Global South
