Disinformation in Social Media as a Strategy of Authoritarian Regimes: Cross-National Analysis

This work is devoted to the study of misinformation in social media in authoritarian states. The goal of paper is to determine what factors contribute to the government’s use misinformation via social media in authoritarian countries. The first chapter is dedicated to the literature review and the study of misinformation in nondemocratic states. The second section presents the regression analysis of collected data, where several hypotheses will be tested. Those hypotheses contain concrete factors which could possibly affect the level of misinformation online. These factors are: type of regime, state capacity, repression level, Internet penetration rate, civil liberties, natural resources and protest activity. As a result of the research, it was concluded that each of the identified factors affects the level government’s use of misinformation in social media except from protest movements.