Autocrats’ Digital Advances Underscore the Need for Civil Society

By creating new digital levers of control, AI and other high-tech advances raise the stakes of the global struggle between democracy’s supporters and power-hungry autocrats. Amid deepening threats to pluralism and free expression, support for innovative civil society organizations that counter digital authoritarianism and build democratic infrastructure is key to carving out a freer future.

The China model takes root abroad

Once seen as a global exception, the digital authoritarian model pioneered in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is spreading. As if to underscore just how quickly, leaked documents analyzed last month by a consortium of rights advocates and investigative reporters revealed how the PRC company Geedge Networks was offering “a commercialized version of the Great Firewall” that local government clients could install at will. PRC “Safe City” packages and other AI surveillance tools can be found from Southeast Asia to Latin America.

Beijing’s aspirations to promote its own “top-down, rule-by-law” model in global tech governance are gaining momentum. The global popularity of PRC open-source AI models will heighten the impact of built-in censorship on topics like Tiananmen Square—tightened since DeepSeek’s much-remarked release at the beginning of this year. Much as analysis of Beijing’s “networked authoritarianism” in the early 2010s tempered early hopes about the internet’s liberatory potential, DeepSeek’s popularity sharply undercuts earlier speculation that generative AI as a technology would prove incompatible with strict government controls on speech.

Governments and companies have acknowledged the threat—most recently with OpenAI’s announcement on the need for tech aligned with “long-standing democratic principles.” Today, all eyes are on state-level competition in the tech space. Yet the confrontation with digital authoritarianism cannot be reduced to a simple question of where technologies are produced: Another investigation last month revealed a long history of US companies providing the building blocks of the PRC surveillance state. On a much more fundamental level, a series of technologies initially expected to diffuse power have also created new levers of control. The threat stemming from the over-concentration of digital power demands a response that is diffuse, agile, and deeply rooted in the societies now under siege from overweening digital authoritarian states.

Confronting the authoritarian challenge

The tech domain illustrates why—in the face of closing civic space, dramatic funding shifts, and even reports of its demise—civil society remains more pivotal than ever to the future of freedom. In my work at the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, I have seen how, out of the spotlight, civic groups worldwide are breaking through censorship, making sure that government tech works for citizens, and building tools that empower ordinary people. Despite the current polarization of the tech space, this work advances fundamental values of individual liberty and popular agency vis-à-vis the state that are at the core of democratic political traditions, in the US and beyond. Their pluralistic, bottom-up approach offers a deeply needed alternative to a future of zero-sum struggle among powerful interests to control centralized platforms—and, through them, our lives.

Today, digital systems—from social media newsfeeds to automated assessment tools used by state bureaucracies—mediate our access to political information, engagement with our governments, and relationships with one another. For autocrats, the implications are obvious: make sure that you are the one who sets the bounds of permissible debate, shapes the training of AI systems, and controls the pipes through which money and information flow. As the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Chin and Liza Lin noted in their cutting-edge book on the PRC surveillance state, modern technologies that promise automated “social management” absent the hassle of open debate represent the culmination of a decades-old authoritarian vision: leveraging data to “engineer away dissent.”

This vision of centralized tech-enabled control threatens not just a discrete sphere of digital rights, but the most basic values of open societies. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, for instance, has observed that “the Chinese Government’s violations of religious freedom are unique because of the extent to which it has relied upon advanced digital and biometric technologies to effectively create a surveillance state.” In their war on independent civic life, autocrats deploy pervasive surveillance (drawing on official tools like the PRC’s “Skynet” or Venezuela’s digital ID system as well as data from private companies); aggressive censorship, carried out through a mix of digital filtering and vague laws nominally targeting real or alleged social ills; and bot and troll armies that bury critical content, barrage critics with violent threats, or report politically ‘offending’ content en masse. Frequently, these tactics are used in tandem, with prolific state sponsors of covert troll farms simultaneously deploying laws on “fake news” and online harms to penalize their critics.

Advances in AI heighten the urgency of the challenge—a risk that goes well beyond DeepSeek. At home, the CCP draws on digitally linked phone data, biometric surveillance, “smart” urban technologies, and more to monitor and constrict people’s movements and behavior. Iran has loudly declared its use of facial-recognition technology to enforce women’s wearing of the hijab, while Russia has used similar means to hunt down men seeking to escape the meat grinder of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Looking forward, the global rush to develop “sovereign AI” will present autocrats with new opportunities to insert censorship directly into online information gateways. At the same time, since frontier models are trained on mass volumes of data trawled from the global internet, censored and propaganda-filled information spaces in some countries can now influence AI outputs worldwide. And the PRC’s “safe cities,” linked to aspirations for an eventual “world digital brain,” raise the specter of a state where omnipresent surveillance tools feed seamlessly into other digital systems that allocate resources and access—yielding quick and pervasive social control, with minimal need for human buy-in.

Other emerging technologies also create capacities that are ripe for abuse. For instance, as cybersecurity expert Valentin Weber’s recent International Forum for Democratic Studies report on “data-centric authoritarianism” shows, central bank digital currencies enable more frictionless state financial monitoring and control, while neurotechnologies and virtual reality interfaces provide new and invasive insights into people’s inner thoughts and feelings.

How civil society fights back

Where the digital path for autocrats is clear, democrats face a deeper challenge. The basic principles of open societies are fundamentally at odds with highly centralized digital control. As pro-democratic voices like Taiwan’s digital ambassador Audrey Tang have underscored, for democracy’s supporters, the breadth and distinctiveness of people’s value systems, religious or secular beliefs, and individual outlooks is a feature, not a bug. Data-driven technologies cannot replace political competition and compromise. And rather than placing ordinary people under a state-operated microscope, information should flow in ways that enable citizens to hold their governments accountable.

The techno-authoritarian impulse seeks to confront atomized individuals with raw force. To repel it, democracy’s supporters must leverage the unique strengths of vibrant, pluralistic civil societies. With a tiny fraction of the resources available to states and corporations, civic technologists—from prominent internet freedom advocacy organizations to grassroots groups that evade censorship in China or monitor corruption in Central Asia—make technology work better for regular people. Members of the broad digital democracy community differ in their priorities, approaches, and views about the complex tradeoffs inherent in digital policy. But their initiatives are invaluable to building our digital future as a laboratory of pluralism, rather than a choice between competing visions of control.

Recent pullbacks in funding have prompted considerable speculation that civil society is past its heyday. A look at the struggle against modern digital authoritarianism, however, offers a reminder that the need for a third force that can strengthen the hand and amplify the voices of the public vis-à-vis concentrated power is only growing. Civil society technologists are fighting techno-totalitarians across at least three vital fronts:

1. Breaking through censorship and intimidation

First, they are breaking through censorship and intimidation to help ensure that a wide range of independent voices can make themselves heard. These initiatives counter the use of digital chokepoints to limit speech and information access. Where authoritarians deploy new technological roadblocks to free speech, digital rights defenders respond with tools like VPNs and mirror sites that enable access to “forbidden” content. Innovators are using satellite communications to create information lifelines in the most draconian of closed settings, such as Iran. In places like Nigeria, free-speech and press-freedom advocates are challenging laws used to suppress journalistic inquiry, political opposition, and public debate. Civil society groups like Access Now provide channels for dissidents to challenge wrongful takedowns and other digital censorship. Researchers empower the public with information about propaganda tactics that autocrats try to keep in the shadows.

The goal of this work is not, and should never be, to build an alternative monopoly over the public square. Rather, it is to give free-thinking people in highly repressive settings—where dissenters must grapple with snitch apps on phones, police harassment over social media posts, and mass political arrests alongside a well-resourced propaganda apparatus—a fighting chance against power-hungry elites who have stacked the deck against them.

2. Putting people in charge

Second, civic technologists are putting people in charge, supporting and monitoring government institutions to ensure that digitalization respects fundamental rights and freedoms. These efforts serve to keep governments accountable as they grow more reliant on advanced technologies. From the UK to the United Arab Emirates, regimes of all political stripes are experimenting with AI applications intended to help shape public policy. Yet where sophisticated AI systems are deployed in government, public servants may struggle to provide explanations or remedies when things go wrong. Where algorithms used for sensitive purposes—like assigning judges to cases—are kept secret, political actors could hide behind “objective” technologies while interfering behind the scenes.

To mitigate these risks, government collaborations with civic coders worldwide have enabled tech-savvy citizens to upgrade the performance of public institutions. At the same time, outside watchdog groups—like the intrepid researchers and civil liberties advocates from Serbia to the Philippines who shed light on the opaque deals behind China’s Digital Silk Road—keep governments honest in their use of tech tools. As one Polish advocate observed, “those who rule the code, rule the people.” Transparent civil society engagement in supporting, monitoring, and upgrading public-sector tech helps to ensure that the code and the coders work for us.

3. Designing technologies that empower citizens

Finally, recognizing that commercial tools may be co-opted by autocrats or simply prove a poor match for civic projects, civil society is designing technologies that empower citizens vis-à-vis their governments. These projects open up new directions in tech development that counter the centralization of power. Several years before the advent of ChatGPT, innovative anticorruption activists in Peru, Brazil, and Ukraine put AI to work sorting through public documents to help find out where officials were likely enriching themselves at the public’s expense. Data journalists have done similar work with leaked documents, satellite photos, and other public sources.

Civic technologists have developed AI tools to help investigate war crimes and human rights abuses, and to support independent election monitoring in closed countries. They are using virtual reality experiences to expose abuses like Venezuela’s treatment of political prisoners. In closed societies, secure tools designed by civic technologists allow citizens to communicate safe from the prying eyes of the surveillance state. Practitioners of deliberative democracy—from peace-builders in conflict zones to Taiwan’s vibrant civic tech community—are designing AI-enabled mechanisms for people to share their views, and for governments to gather input from voters.

The future of freedom

Collectively, this work points toward a vision where rather than paternalistically shaping our future from above, AI empowers people on the ground with access to information and opportunities for meaningful debate. The small organizations breaking down internet censorship and monitoring the trails of corrupt officials may seem fragile next to the growing Goliath of state-sponsored digital authoritarianism. Yet they are finding ways to give the digital advantage back to regular people. These exercises in digital democracy underscore the irreplaceable role of civil society groups in freedom’s defense: They disrupt government abuses, equip ordinary citizens with tools and information, and, crucially, offer choice.

In the end, a truly democratic alternative to the stifling uniformity of techno-totalitarianism can emerge only from a pluralistic assortment of bottom-up efforts. Open political systems reject slicing up every aspect of life into data points that can be quantified, categorized, and rewarded or punished per a unified schema. Rather, they zealously safeguard the fundamental freedoms of expression, association, and belief—precisely because they recognize that no one person, institution, or machine always knows best. With societies worldwide under threat from authoritarian models that seek to entrap us in a constricting digital cage, the grassroots initiatives that both advance and embody this approach will be pivotal to the future of freedom.