Digital Authoritarianism Quotes

Countries like Iran and China support an Internet Iron Curtain that would censor political dissidents and deny anonymous activity online through mandatory registrations of IP addresses.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.

It's hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing - which I think is what we have - gives us '1984.'

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.

It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the internet as a threat in part because they see the US government behind the internet. It would not be accurate to say they are reacting to the threat posed by the internet, they are reacting to the threat poised by United States via the internet. They are not reacting against blogs, or Facebook or Twitter per se, they are reacting against organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy funding bloggers and activists.

If the social media platforms don't take the gatekeeping seriously they will kill the public sphere. If we don't get this right in 2020 you can open a decade or longer of a descent into fascism. And it will be global because platforms are global.

My whole life I grew up thinking there is one Internet, but there are actually two, one in the rest of the world and one in China. The one in China is advanced and hi-tech, but it's a scary Internet.

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.

Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power.