In one way or another, all governments seek to influence public opinion in their favor. Especially, authoritarian regimes are notorious for their tight control of domestic media. Censorship and propaganda are generally regarded as effective instruments for maintaining political stability and securing existing power structures. However, despite their capabilities, current authoritarian regimes largely refrain from an all-encompassing censorship policy. Chinese censors, for example, have been shown to be far more selective than expected. Our findings suggest that this relative restraint is due to the backlash potential of disinformation practices, as we show that excessive state censorship can have severe effects for the censoring regime.
In the 1970s already, laboratory experiments in psychology showed that people who find themselves censored react with strong rejection and distrust the censors. Media censorship thus entails great risks for political regimes in power. If the population becomes aware of being censored and subsequently rejects state media, the government will lose its key tool to manipulate people’s minds. For this reason, states want to disguise their censoring efforts. This begs the questions of how people can identify censorship outside the lab, and whether they show the same indignation in a highly authoritarian environment. We expect that censorship is likely to backfire against the regime when people recognize disinformation on state media with the help of alternative sources of information (e.g. foreign TV, radio, or online media).
Empirically, we show that this is precisely what happened in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the revolutionary year of 1989. Leveraging data from a unique survey series in a full-blown autocracy, we demonstrate how an excessive disinformation campaign caused significant political backlash against the East German regime among those respondents who had access to alternative information on West-German television. To analyze the effect of alternative sources, we compile a dataset of 17,551 approval ratings from weekly surveys on GDR state media and combined them with daily content data of West-German news programs. Utilizing both temporal variation in reporting and spatial variation in West-German TV reception, we show that respondents strongly disapproved of the blatant censorship on GDR state news if they had access to alternative information.
The study has important implications. First, our findings highlight that autocrats are rightly afraid of alternative information as these may unmask disinformation campaigns and thus threaten their political survival. Second, external information campaigns may indeed induce liberalization processes even in highly ideologized dictatorships. Finally, however, our findings suggest that campaigns aimed at undermining trust in traditional journalism may also cause political backlash against righteous media and democratic governments who grant full freedom of expression. Quality journalism appears to be particularly vulnerable to accusations of censorship as serious news outlets must check facts carefully and indeed decide against publication in case of doubt about a story’s authenticity. Given the backlash potential from perceived censorship, it is of utmost importance that democratic governments protect quality journalism from illusive campaigns.