Modern Communication Technologies, Protests, and Service Blocking

Abstract:
We develop a theory of information exchange and protests when citizens use modern communication technologies, such as online social networks and instant messaging platforms, for protest coordination. Citizens incur private costs from protesting against the government, and this strategic uncertainty hinders coordination. Cheap-talk communication via communication technologies allows citizens to resolve uncertainty and facilitates protest coordination. To counteract this, governments can respond by blocking services used for communication. We find that governments practice service blocking when the citizens’ discontent with governmental policies is intermediate, but less so when the common costs of protesting rise. We provide high-frequency within-country empirical evidence consistent with our theoretical predictions. We document a statistically significant inverted U-shaped relationship between expected citizens’ discontent and the likelihood of service blocking. This non-linear effect is significantly stronger in countries with lower police presence, i.e., lower physical costs of protesting.