The Protest-Repression Nexus in the Digital Age: A Scoping Review on Social Media’s Role in Protest-Repression Dynamics

Social media have brought about significant changes in the dynamics of political protest within authoritarian societies, offering dissidents new avenues to express their grievances and garner support for their causes. For example, social media have been found to be instrumental in disseminating information about protests (Faris, 2010; Lotan et al., 2011; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012), coordinating logistics (Tucker et al., 2016), enhancing visibility (Lysenko & Desouza, 2012; Bruns et al., 2013), and providing support to protesters (Tucker et al., 2014). Nevertheless, social media have also been utilized by ruling regimes and their supporters as a means to hinder and suppress political unrest. For instance, they have been exploited for propaganda and surveillance by authorities (Morozov, 2011; Zhuravskaya et al., 2020), censorship of pro-opposition content and endorsement of pro-regime supporters (Feldstein, 2021; Earl et al., 2022), as well as identifying and imprisoning protesters (Aday et al., 2010; Tucker et al., 2017). Despite extensive research, a thorough understanding of how social media is used to enable and suppress protest movements remains limited due to the diverse range of platforms, their affordances, protest forms, and the contexts studied. This scoping literature review gathers and analyzes the existing literature on the role of social media in protest and repression within authoritarian settings. The review examines and compares the evolution of these dynamics across different types of authoritarian contexts, such as policy-critical and leadership-critical publics, as described by Toepfl (2020). Additionally, the review explores methodological approaches, data collection strategies, and reported limitations to further shed light on areas that require more attention. The following research questions are addressed. RQ1: What social media platforms, affordances, and activities have been studied in relation to what forms of political protest and repression in authoritarian contexts? RQ2: What social media-related variables or phenomena have been reported as potentially impacting political protest and repression in authoritarian contexts? RQ3: What methods and data have been used in academic research on the role of social media in political protest and repression in authoritarian contexts? RQ4: What insights can be drawn from the literature on the dynamics between digital repression and political protest on social media, and how do these dynamics vary across different authoritarian contexts? The review includes 434 peer-reviewed empirical articles focusing on the intersection of social media with either political protest or repression in authoritarian contexts published in academic journals from January 1997 through June 2023 and indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCO. The review provides a quantitative descriptive analysis of the manifest content to address the first three research questions and a qualitative analysis of the latent content to answer the fourth research question. Additionally, the review identifies current research gaps and proposes directions for future studies while considering the potential risk of bias and other limitations in the existing research. By critically assessing the current state of knowledge, this review contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of social media's role in both facilitating and suppressing political protests within authoritarian contexts.