Authoritarian Propaganda and Social Networks

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 inbetween.