{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ScholarlyArticle",
  "@id": "https://miklian.org/papers/digital-governance-in-hybrid-regimes-social-media-platforms-democracy-authoritarianism#article",
  "headline": "Digital Governance in Hybrid Regimes: How Global Social Media Platforms Navigate the Space Between Democracy and Authoritarianism",
  "name": "Digital Governance in Hybrid Regimes: How Global Social Media Platforms Navigate the Space Between Democracy and Authoritarianism",
  "author": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Jason Miklian",
      "sameAs": [
        "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1227-0975",
        "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RHlevGEAAAAJ&hl=en",
        "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason-Miklian",
        "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q47107618",
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Miklian",
        "https://www.globe.uio.no/english/people/aca/jasontm/",
        "https://www.prio.org/people/5833",
        "https://jasonmiklian.com"
      ],
      "@id": "https://miklian.org/#person"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Sarah Cechvala"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "John Katsos"
    }
  ],
  "datePublished": "2026",
  "isPartOf": {
    "@type": "Periodical",
    "name": "Under Review"
  },
  "url": "https://miklian.org/papers/digital-governance-in-hybrid-regimes-social-media-platforms-democracy-authoritarianism",
  "abstract": "Global social media platforms can both enable and undermine public spheres of deliberation. These dynamics are acutely felt in hybrid regimes: governance settings that maintain formally democratic legal frameworks while systematically undermining them through executive overreach and selective enforcement. This paper investigates how global social media platforms operate within hybrid regimes, developing a “worst of both worlds” framework to argue that these contexts produce a distinctive three-way mismatch between citizen expectations of democratic protection, platform design assumptions rooted in liberal democratic norms, and regime exploitation of both. Drawing on a four-part taxonomy of government platform measures and caselet studies of Turkey (2016-2024), India (2019-2025), and Myanmar (2011-2024), we show how hybrid regimes deploy content control, surveillance, propaganda dissemination, and democratic façade maintenance through formally legal mechanisms that set them apart from fully authoritarian digital governance. We conclude with implications for platform governance, cautioning against the assumption that hybrid regimes are “almost democratic” and highlighting the structural risks for users, firms, and civic trust.",
  "keywords": [
    "hybrid regimes",
    "social media platforms",
    "digital governance",
    "competitive authoritarianism",
    "democratic backsliding",
    "platform regulation"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
  "inLanguage": "en"
}