IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/20320.html

Authoritarian Propaganda and Social Networks

Author

Listed:
  • Sonin, Konstantin

Abstract

Information manipulation is a powerful tool in the hands of any authoritarian leader. Dictators block independent media, censor news, pay influencers, and control citizens' social connections. In our model, citizens acquire information from censored sources or through social networks. Naturally, information manipulation has less impact when consuming news is costly and percolation in the network is low. Less intuitively, it might be optimal for the regime to target peripheral, rather than centrally connected citizens, and the propaganda's maximum impact is when percolation of information is close to zero (the society is atomized) or close to one, but not in-between.

Suggested Citation

  • Sonin, Konstantin, 2025. "Authoritarian Propaganda and Social Networks," CEPR Discussion Papers 20320, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20320
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP20320
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • P00 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - General - - - General
    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20320. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.