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By Root 1825 0

embrace—is typical of how authoritarian regimes respond to the Internet. First, they believe that the Web is something frivolous that will go away as fast at it has appeared. To their great disappointment, it never does; worse, sooner or later it is embraced by the opposition, if there is one, who use it chiefly to avoid the government’s tight control of the media. This is when many authoritarian governments begin to experiment with censorship. Much here depends on the political situation in their countries. For some, Internet censorship would be acceptable, because they already censor other media; for others, direct censorship would not be an option, as they prefer to crack down on free media through more indirect means, ranging from tax inspections to intimidation of individual journalists. When Internet censorship is impractical, politically indefensible, or prohibitively expensive, governments begin to experiment with propaganda and, in a few extreme cases, pervasive surveillance.

Unlike many authoritarian governments, Chavez’s regime has always preferred softer means of intervention and control, trying to avoid the harsher methods embraced by the Chinese and Iranian governments. Thus, in 2007 Chavez refused to renew the concession given to Globovision, a popular—and extremely critical—TV channel, essentially forcing it to move to cable, while in 2009 his communications minister shut down more than sixty radio stations, stating that they lacked the necessary licenses and promising to use their frequencies for community media. When it comes to Twitter, from which the government cannot really withdraw a license, Chavez’s choice is not between censorship and free speech but between staying out of the Twitter space altogether—and thus, risking losing control of online conversations—and trying to infuse such conversations with his own ideology.

This is not how it was supposed to be. Many early predictions about the Internet posited that it would rid the world of government propaganda. Frances Cairncross in her 1997 best seller, The Death of Distance, a defining text in the cyber-utopian canon, predicted that “free to explore different points of view, on the Internet or on the thousands of television and radio channels that will eventually be available, people will become less susceptible to propaganda from politicians.” Her prediction proved to be wrong: Governments have learned that they can still manipulate online conversations by slightly adjusting how they manufacture and package their propaganda, with some of their older and otherwise stale messages finding new life and appealing to new audiences. It was hard to predict that xenophobic and anti-American messages would sound more persuasive when delivered by edgy and supposedly independent bloggers.

But this raises an even broader question: Why does government propaganda—and especially propaganda based on lies and intentional misrepresentation of facts—still work in an age when one could find plenty of credible evidence online to disprove it? It works for the same unfortunate reasons that myths about Barack Obama’s missing birth certificate or the myths about 9/11 being an inside job work for so many audiences in America. The easy availability of evidence to the contrary is not enough to dispel such myths, for they are not always based on rational examination of evidence. In addition, certain structural conditions of public life under an authoritarian regime might make such government-induced myths harder to dispel. Barbara Geddes, a noted political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, who studied sources of popular support for authoritarian states around the world, discovered that a particular sector in the population is most susceptible to government propaganda. Usually it is what we can best describe as the middle class: people with some basic education who earn a good living and are neither poor and ignorant nor rich and sophisticated. (These two latter groups, Geddes found, were least susceptible to government propaganda: the former because