Doctoral Dissertation Research: Negotiation between State and Individuals through Social Media

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In this project it will be investigated how authoritarian regimes can survive ideological crisis in the social media era through the combination of coercive and non-coercive media control strategies. Scholars interested in democracy have observed the growth of social media with anticipation as they imagined it to be a potential source of free communication and democratization, particularly in authoritarian states. However, in many cases, authoritarian governments have been able to maintain their positions or even to use social media to strengthen them. This proposed research will shed light on the puzzle of authoritarian resilience by investigating the potential for using non-coercive means to re-orient public attention in officially approved directions. Findings will contribute to national security by furthering understanding of the connection between development, in particular, adoption of new information and communication technology, and political change.Focusing on one important case, two main questions are asked in this research: 1) How a pro-democracy wave furthered by officials has affected discussion on democracy in the microblog-based public sphere? 2) Who is winning the ideological battle between the officials and the public? These questions will be addressed through a longitudinal analysis of microblog posts with the keyword "democracy" from 2009 to 2018 and contents that have been censored. Computer-aided text analytic techniques, alongside more conventional content analysis methodologies, will be used for discovering topics within the text, constructing semantic networks and comparing the contents generated by the state agency, the individual user and the censored user.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.