The Impact of Legal Repression on Citizen Online Behavior: Evidence from Tanzania’s Jamii Forums.

(With Serkant Adiguzel and Erik Wibbels). Working paper.

Recommended citation: How does the restrictive legislation on online behavior impact citizen posting on the web? Although many welcomed the internet as a liberating technology, especially after the Arab Spring, governments quickly adopted various surveillance and repression strategies to monitor, regulate, and steer online citizen behavior. Given the global rise of informational autocrats it is critical to understand the impact of such legal repression on citizens' online behavior. Previous research has shown that the internet, particularly social media, has a significant impact on political participation in the form of voting behavior and protests. While some research has examined how repressive regimes use propaganda and repress information systems, there is little to no evidence on the impact of legal repression on citizens' online behavior. We provide such evidence from the context of Tanzania, where we analyze the impact of the 2015 Cybercrimes Law on posts on political threads in Jamii Forums –a widely used, citizen-driven online platform in the country. Our initial analysis of more than 11 million individual posts reveals four key findings. First, there is increased activity on political threads during the period leading up to the Cybercrimes Act going into full effect (September 2015). Second, the number of new and inactive individual accounts increases dramatically during the period between the parliamentary approval of the Cybercrimes Act (April 2015) and when it went into full effect. One possibility is that this indicates citizens using new accounts to hide their identities. Third, consistent with that possibility, new accounts that are opened in the lead up to the law's enforcement have the same sentiment towards government actors relative to accounts that go inactive. This suggests that the law failed to reduce the incidence of critical posting against the government by citizens. Fourth, there is also a spike in inactive accounts after the law goes into effect. This spike does not correspond with a wave of new accounts and more likely reflects citizens withdrawing from online posting.