research-article

A Bayesian Analysis of Collective Action and Internet Shutdowns in India

Authors:

Michael Collyer,

Joss WrightAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '21: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021

Pages 309 - 318

https://doi.org/10.1145/3447535.3462480

Published: 22 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Since 2011, internet shutdowns have steadily become an increasingly popular form of digital repression, especially in India – which accounted for more than 50% of global recorded shutdowns from 2016 to 2019. Common shutdown justifications include ‘ensuring public safety’ in order to curb the prevalence of collective action in the form of protests and riots. This paper examines the correlation between internet shutdowns and a range of predictors, identifying riots as the main predictor of a shutdown.

We focus on shutdowns throughout India between 2016 and 2019 with particular attention to Jammu and Kashmir. Primarily using data from the NGO Access Now and the Integrated Conflict Early Warning System, we apply Bayesian inference via generalised linear modelling implemented using the Stan probabilistic programming language, to estimate correlates of shutdown behaviour. We first examine how the prevalence of collective action may impact the probability of observing a shutdown; and second how the length of a shutdown impacts subsequent collective action.

Our main finding is that riots seem to be the key predictor of a shutdown with increased protests and riots increasing the odds of observing a shutdown the same day by 7% with a 95% credible interval of 0.01-0.13 and 15% with a 95% credible interval of 0.03-0.26 respectively. As a predictor, however, the duration of an internet shutdown only has a marginal negative effect on the occurrence of riots at -8% per subsequent shutdown day with a 95% credible interval of -0.16 to -0.002.

References

[1]

E. Stepanova, “The Role of Information Communication Technologies in the “ Arab Spring" IMPLICATIONS BEYOND THE REGION,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 159, pp. 1–6, 2011.

[2]

P. N. Howard and M. M. Hussain, Democracy's Fourth Wave? 2013.

[3]

H. Peleg and J. Mendilow, “Corruption and the Arab Spring Comparing the Pre- and Post-Spring Situation,” pp. 99–115, 2014.

[4]

L. Grinin, A. Korotayev, and A. Tausch, Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. 2018.

[5]

B. Wellman, “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism,” J. Comput. Commun., vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 0–0, 2003.

[6]

L. DeNardis, “Hidden levers of internet control: An infrastructure-based theory of Internet governance,” Inf. Commun. Soc., vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 720–738, 2012.

[7]

Access Now, “Fighting Internet Shutdowns Around The World,” Access Now, p. 4, 2018.

[8]

Access Now, “The State of Internet Shutdowns Around the World: The 2018 #Keepiton Report,” 2019.

[9]

Access Now, “Targeted, Cut off, and Left in the Dark: The #KeepItOn report on internet shutdowns in 2019,” 2020.

[10]

Internet Shutdown Project, “Internet Shutdown Tracker,” 2020. [Online]. Available: https://internetshutdowns.in/. [Accessed: 21-Jun-2020].

[11]

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, “IFLA Statement on Internet Shutdowns,” no. August. 2018.

[12]

Access Now, “RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016,” pp. 1–9, 2016.

[13]

J. Wright, A. Darer, and O. Farnan, “On identifying anomalies in tor usage with applications in detecting internet censorship,” WebSci 2018 - Proc. 10th ACM Conf. Web Sci., pp. 87–96, 2018.

Digital Library

[14]

Internet Society, “Internet Shutdowns An Internet Society Public Policy Briefing,” no. December, pp. 1–13, 2017.

[15]

K. Collins, “Inside the dystopian nightmare of an internet shutdown,” CNET, 31-Oct-2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.cnet.com/features/inside-the-dystopian-nightmare-of-an-internet-shutdown/. [Accessed: 13-Jun-2020].

[16]

E. Marchant and N. Stremlau, “AFRICA ’ S INTERNET SHUTDOWNS WORKSHOP,” 2019.

[17]

Internet and Mobile Association of India, “DIGITAL IN INDIA 2019-ROUND 2 REPORT,” 2019.

[18]

D. M. West, “Internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion last year,” Brookings Inst., no. October, pp. 1–20, 2016.

[19]

R. Kathuria, M. Kedia, G. Varma, K. Bagchi, and R. Sekhani, “The Anatomy of an INTERNET BLACKOUT: Measuring the Economic Impact of Internet Shutdowns in India,” no. April, 2018.

[20]

United Nations, “General Assembly - Item #10, Document Reference A/HRC/32/L.20.” 2016.

[21]

J. Rydzak, “Disconnected: A Human Rights-Based Approach to Network Disruptions,” 2019.

[22]

R. Shandler, “Measuring the political and social consequences of government-initiated cyber shutdowns,” 8th USENIX Work. Free Open Commun. Internet, FOCI 2018, co-located with USENIX Secur. 2018, 2018.

[23]

J. Wright, “Regional variation in Chinese internet filtering,” Inf. Commun. Soc., vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 121–141, 2014.

[24]

C. Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–23, 2007.

[25]

W. Moore, “Repression and Dissent: Substitution, Context, and Timing,” Midwest Polit. Sci. Assoc., vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 851–873, 1998.

[26]

D. McAdam, J. McCarthy, and M. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. New York, New York, USA: Cambridge University Press., 1996.

[27]

T. Gurr, “Why Men Rebel,” 1970.

[28]

M. Olson, “The Logic of Collective Action,” The Political Economy of Growth. 1965.

[29]

R. Hardin, “Collective Action As An Agreeable n-Prisoners’ Dilemma,” Behav. Sci., vol. 16, 1971.

[30]

B. Bimber, A. J. Flanagin, and C. Stohl, “Action in the Contemporary,” Commun. Theory, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 365–388, 2005.

[31]

W. L. Bennett and A. Segerberg, “The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics,” Inf. Commun. Soc., vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 739–768, 2012.

[32]

BBC, “Citizenship Act protests: Three dead and thousands held in India - BBC News,” 19-Dec-2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50833361. [Accessed: 17-Jun-2020].

[33]

S. Keelery, “Number of social network users in India from 2015 to 2018 with a forecast until 2023,” Statista Database, 07-Jul-2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278407/number-of-social-network-users-in-india/. [Accessed: 05-Sep-2020].

[34]

J. Rydzak, “A Total Eclipse of the Net: The Dynamics of Network Shutdowns and Collective Action Responses TT - Une éclipse totale du Net: Les coupures de communication digitale et l'action collective,” ProQuest Diss. Theses, p. 268, 2018.

[35]

E. Boschee, J. Lautenschlager, S. O'Brien, S. Shellman, and J. Starz, “ICEWS Coded Event Data,” Harvard Dataverse, vol. V28, 2015.

[36]

M. Betancourt, “Towards A Principled Bayesian Workflow,” Apr-2020. [Online]. Available: https://betanalpha.github.io/assets/case_studies/principled_bayesian_workflow.html. [Accessed: 27-Aug-2020].

[37]

Stan Development Team, “Stan Modeling Language: User's Guide and Reference Manual,” 2015.

[38]

P.-C. Buerkner, “brms: An R package for Bayesian multilevel models using Stan,” J. Stat. Softw., vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2017.

[39]

J. Fox, “Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models. Chapter 15: Generalized Linear Models,” 2015.

[40]

A. Vehtari, A. Gelman, J. Gabry, P.-C. Bürkner, and M. Magnusson, “Efficient Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation and WAIC for Bayesian Models,” Stat. Comput., vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 1413–1432, 2017.

Digital Library

[41]

A. Gelman, A. Jakulin, M. G. Pittau, and Y. S. Su, “A weakly informative default prior distribution for logistic and other regression models,” Ann. Appl. Stat., vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 1360–1383, 2008.

[42]

Y. Breindl and J. Wright, “Internet filtering trends in western liberal democracies: French and German regulatory debates,” 2nd USENIX Work. Free Open Commun. Internet, FOCI 2012, co-located with USENIX Secur. 2012, 2012.

[43]

D. Polatin-Reuben and J. Wright, “An internet with BRICS characteristics: Data sovereignty and the balkanisation of the internet,” 4th USENIX Work. Free Open Commun. Internet, FOCI 2014, co-located with USENIX Secur. 2014, 2014.

[44]

B. Zevenbergen, I. Brown, J. Wright, and D. Erdos, “Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements,” SSRN Electron. J., no. November, pp. 1–41, 2013.

[45]

A. Darer, O. Farnan, and J. Wright, “FilteredWeb: A framework for the automated search-based discovery of blocked URLs,”, 2017 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), 2017.

[46]

A. Darer, O. Farnan, J. Wright, "Automated discovery of internet censorship by web crawling", Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science. 2018

[47]

K. Rasler, “Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest in the Iranian Revolution,” vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 132–152, 1996.

Cited By

Tagat APhokeer AKreitem H(2024)Net Loss: An econometric method to measure the impact of Internet shutdownsACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/36594662:2(1-22)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659466
Bischof ZPitcher KCarisimo EMeng ABezerra Nunes RPadmanabhan RRoberts MSnoeren ADainotti ASchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and ShutdownsProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604883(608-621)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604883
Sedashov EBelenkov VKoncha V(2023)The Effect of Internet Shutdowns on Protest Activity in India: an Empirical Investigation2023 16th International Conference Management of large-scale system development (MLSD)10.1109/MLSD58227.2023.10304037(1-4)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MLSD58227.2023.10304037

Recommendations

Net Loss: An econometric method to measure the impact of Internet shutdowns
The economic costs of Internet shutdowns are far-reaching and widespread and span beyond the simple disruption to communication networks that are reliant on access to the Internet. Existing work on the impacts of the Internet shutdowns does not ...
Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and Shutdowns
ACM SIGCOMM '23: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference

In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of government-ordered Internet shutdowns and spontaneous outages (i.e., disruptions not ordered by the government). We describe the available tools, data sources and methods to ...
Poster: Predicting Internet Shutdowns - A Machine Learning Approach
IMC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference

Internet shutdowns, often enforced by governments to control communication and access to information, have significant socio-political and economic implications. This study presents a machine learning approach to predict the likelihood of internet ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '21: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021

June 2021

328 pages

ISBN:9781450383301

DOI:10.1145/3447535

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 June 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

WebSci '21

Sponsor:

SIGWEB

WebSci '21: WebSci '21 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021

June 21 - 25, 2021

Virtual Event, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

Websci '25

Sponsor:
sigweb

17th ACM Web Science Conference

May 20 - 24, 2025

New Brunswick , NJ , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
191
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tagat APhokeer AKreitem H(2024)Net Loss: An econometric method to measure the impact of Internet shutdownsACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/36594662:2(1-22)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659466
Bischof ZPitcher KCarisimo EMeng ABezerra Nunes RPadmanabhan RRoberts MSnoeren ADainotti ASchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and ShutdownsProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604883(608-621)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604883
Sedashov EBelenkov VKoncha V(2023)The Effect of Internet Shutdowns on Protest Activity in India: an Empirical Investigation2023 16th International Conference Management of large-scale system development (MLSD)10.1109/MLSD58227.2023.10304037(1-4)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MLSD58227.2023.10304037

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten