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Thread: Syllabus alert -- New paper w/ @henryfarrell in @IntOrgJournal on how the liberal international information order is becoming self-undermining. Helps makes sense of stories like this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-future-of-the-internet-could-be-chinese-and-authoritarian-warns-senate-foreign-relations-report/2020/07/21/e6b5092c-ca4a-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html
2/Access to the paper is here. The rest of the thread unpacks and applies to the Senate report. https://www.dropbox.com/s/qcpqpcapjb82k51/FarrellNewman_FinalJuly202020.docx?dl=0
3/Since the 1990s, there was a naive policy view that open information flows generated positive feedbacks politically and economically e.g. social media would topple authoritarian governments. https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/01/135519.htm
4/Unsurprisingly, authoritarian governments saw this as a challenge to regime stability and did not see it in the same light... https://www.jstor.org/stable/43279645?casa_token=EBofygSqqgAAAAAA%3AUKsLWREcGSX_Fm_wjApeO5mTFQRTNpzITxBfXPQ0TvpPlH-PZqX3DWDA5bfhLA_abWB00VaOc9JbZU9dIBGE5j4zJo64N9JdRK9UJ4URTQ6JMQNVeJ8o&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
5/At first, countries like Russia and China tried to lobby globally to restrict pure openness. The US blocked these efforts. https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html
6/So these countries developed other ways to insulate themselves from open information flows. Think the Great Firewall. But these insulation strategies also generated experiments like new troll farms, doxing... https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:555c1e20-60d0-4a20-8837-c68868cc0c96
7/These new authoritarian experiments did not just have implications for authoritarian societies but could be turned against liberal states. It turns out that too much information can be perilous for democracies. http://bostonreview.net/forum-henry-farrell-bruce-schneier-democracys-dilemma
8/As the Mueller report makes clear, what started as domestic information tactics were turned outwards. This is now happening again in the case of COVID. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/21/russia-china-iran-disinformation-coronavirus-state-department-193107
9/As a result, western societies are now starting to question the pillars of information governance -- openness and private actor self-regulation. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-president-election-section-230-communications-decency-act-revoke
10/And this in not just a US thing. https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/germany-tightens-online-hate-speech-rules-to-make-platforms-send-reports-straight-to-the-feds/?guccounter=1
11/Liberal states need to develop strategies to insulate themselves from authoritarian information experiments. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html
12/At the same time, they need domestic information openness to facilitate democratic decision-making. The key will be to strike this balance.
13/Key takeaway from the article is that domestic and global information systems interact. Authoritarian governments turned openness into a vector of attack on liberal society. Western governments had used information openness to undermine authoritarian regimes.
14/More generally, information politics have received too little attention in mainstream IR debates. https://academic.oup.com/isq/article-abstract/55/3/589/1825516
15/Given the stakes of digital technology for global society (economically, politically, and strategically), we continue to ignore it at our own peril. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-accuses-two-hackers-of-stealing-secrets-from-u-s-firms-for-china-11595345257
