There are growing reports on autocrats’ cyber armies that run anti-dissident campaigns across multiple digital platforms on an industrial scale. Nonetheless, there lacks research that systematically examines the platform affordances that enable such coordinated repression. In this talk, Dr. Mai Van Tran presents her latest co-authored study that scrutinises the extent to which the algorithmic curation, moderation, and design by social media platforms might facilitate cross-platform authoritarian repression, with evidence from conflict-ridden Myanmar. The focus is on Myanmar’s military administration SAC, which has orchestrated repression across three main platforms: Telegram, Facebook, and TikTok. Based on a list of prominent pro-SAC accounts and keywords, the study captured more than 1 million public social media posts during February 2021- February 2024. With a supervised machine learning approach, the authors develop novel logistic regression and Large Language Model classifiers for four types of authoritarian content based on a random sample of 6,000 labelled posts. The research highlights the oft-neglected user experiences with tech-enabled repression in the Global South. The findings will also deepen our understanding on autocrats’ industrial innovations in an age of algorithmic platforms.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr. Mai Van Tran is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research examines the resilience and adaptiveness of pro-democracy activism and human rights advocacy in digitally-connected societies, with a focus on Myanmar and Southeast Asia. Her academic research and book review are published at International Affairs, Big Data & Society, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Politics & Policy, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, and Open Research Europe. She also provided policy recommendations to development partners at Myanmar Digital Rights Forum, Meta, the United Nations, European Union, Oxfam, etc. Other public scholarship works on Myanmar politics have appeared in more than 100 media outlets, research blogs, and podcasts.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).