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.