Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Kiran Garimella’s Substack and has been republished here with the author’s permission. You can read the original article here: [Link].
This post is about our recent ICWSM paper, where we tried an intervention to reduce support for internet shutdowns. Paper and video recording.
The core idea was that even though internet shutdowns are highly prevalent, there is a lot of support for them. We wanted to know why and if we can do anything to change it.
We hypothesized that if people experience an internet shutdown themselves, they might support such government mandated internet shutdowns less.
We simulated an internet shutdown by paying people to turn off their internet for 2 days and found that people’s support for shutdowns increased.
Qualitative analysis showed that people just substituted their internet use time with other tasks and thought of the 2 days without internet as a ‘digital detox’.
What are internet shutdowns?
An internet shutdown is when government orders the telecom operators to cut service, and they comply, across a defined geographic area, for as long as the order stands. It can be a city, a state, or a whole country. It can last a few hours or, in the worst cases, years. Sometimes only mobile data is killed. Sometimes everything is cut, including landlines and broadband.
In the past decade this has moved from an unusual measure to a routine tool of governance across much of the world. Access Now, which tracks these orders, counted almost 300 shutdowns across 54 countries in 2024 alone, the highest figure on record. Iran shut down internet nationwide during the 2022 protests after Mahsa Amini’s death, and again repeatedly through 2024 when fresh protests broke out. Pakistan suspended mobile networks across the country on election day in February 2024 and has kept platform-level blocks on Twitter in place ever since. Ethiopia held the Tigray region offline for nearly two years during the war there. Myanmar’s military pulled the plug within hours of the 2021 coup and has kept large parts of the country dark since. Bangladesh blacked out the entire country for ten days in July 2024 to try to break the student protests that ended up pulling Sheikh Hasina’s government down anyway. Belarus did it through the 2020 election.
The justifications governments give for these orders fall on a spectrum. At the serious end, its genuine national security, public order, preventing people from organizing during a protest, breaking up a riot before it spreads. Whatever phrasing each government prefers, the underlying calculation is that the cost of letting people coordinate in real time during a moment of crisis is higher than the cost of severing the country from the rest of the internet for a while.
And then there are the strange reasons for shutdowns: exams. Algeria has cut the internet across the entire…
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