Tyrants on Twitter

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of democratic decay and creeping authoritarianism. This means that the number of democracies is declining, while the number of authoritarian states is increasing. It also means that the quality of democracy in existing democratic states is deteriorating, whereas autocrats are exercising greater control over their populations than they did in the past. This is not a novel point; a lot of other people have made the point, but that is my starting point for the analysis in this book.

The second big point of the book—and this is more of a novel point—is that Chinese and Russian information warfare is contributing to both democratic decay and creeping authoritarianism. I do a really in-depth dive looking separately at China and Russia. One former government official said that “Russia is a hurricane and China is climate change.” That phrase nicely captures the differences between them. Russian information warfare is primarily negative and destructive; Russia is trying to undermine existing democracies.

Chinese information warfare, in contrast, is aimed at bringing about a gradual change in the liberal international order to make that system align better with its illiberal values. The key similarity is that both Russia and China are accelerating the processes of democratic decay and creeping authoritarianism. Moreover, they are using information technology, generally, and social media, in particular, to do that.

Then, third, the book presents a detailed proposal for transnational regulatory cooperation among liberal democracies.

If liberal democracies want to resist creeping authoritarianism and enhance democracy in existing democracies, we need better defenses against information warfare. This is something that liberal democracies need to work on cooperatively. It’s not a US problem, it’s not a French problem, it’s not an Australian problem – although it affects all of us. In order to respond effectively, we need a cooperative approach that involves what some legal scholars call “regulatory harmonization” among liberal democracies. So that’s the basic pitch of the book. That’s the nutshell version.