Digital technologies have become key tools for authoritarian populist regimes, enabling new forms of surveillance, ideological control, and statecraft. This article examines how leaders in Brazil, Hungary, India, and Türkiye have embraced digital authoritarianism to consolidate power, and how resistance to these efforts is unfolding.
Gülşen Doğan
September 10, 2025
Digital authoritarianism refers to the strategic use of digital tools by governments to extend executive control, suppress dissent, and reshape public discourse. In populist regimes, this control is often justified through majoritarian or ideological narratives and sustained through increasingly sophisticated technological infrastructures. The Human Development Report 2025 notes that digital governance is increasingly split between centralized state control and market-driven models, with hybrid systems emerging where populist leaders use democratic institutions to tighten their grip. These leaders often present themselves as open and modern while expanding surveillance, weakening privacy protections, and deepening political patronage. The cross-border flows of technology – from surveillance tools to content moderation systems – reflect the politics of their adopters and reinforce domestic authoritarian trends. These global dynamics take different forms, but often converge around three core mechanisms: surveillance, propaganda, and clientelism.
Surveillance and Data Infrastructure
In Türkiye, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has established extensive digital surveillance mechanisms. Public spaces are monitored through MOBESE cameras, a nationwide network of high-definition closed-circuit television systems linked directly to police command centers, enabling real-time tracking and identification of individuals. Footage from these systems can be combined with user data obtained from service providers, which the state can demand without court orders via the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, to build comprehensive profiles of targeted individuals. Like other authoritarian surveillance systems, MOBESE integrates physical monitoring with digital control, creating a seamless apparatus for tracking the opposition and enforcing political compliance. Moreover, Internet law reforms in 2020 expanded the government’s censorship powers, allowing it to block content and throttle bandwidth during crises or protests.
India, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has seen increased digital surveillance through state and corporate collaboration. At the core is Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity system, administered by the Unique Identification Authority of India. While officially framed as a welfare tool, Aadhaar is owned and operated by the state, and it gives the government, and by extension, the ruling party broad access to linked personal data across banking, telecoms, healthcare, and other services. The BJP-led government has also deployed facial recognition and predictive policing technologies in smart city programs, partnering with private firms to build a database-heavy regime that enables granular monitoring of citizens.
During the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s government utilized digital tools to monitor political opposition and civil society. Surveillance was less institutionalized but nevertheless weaponized. Police data systems were used to monitor political opponents and protest organizers, while social media platforms were mined for evidence of dissent.
In Hungary, digital authoritarianism is less overt but the regime’s manipulation of political institutions indicates a subtler form of control. The Fidesz government has long relied on institutional and media capture but recent developments point to an escalation in digital surveillance. In 2025, legislation authorized the use of facial recognition at public demonstrations. Though framed as a security measure, this law significantly expands the state’s capacity to identify and track dissenters.
Digital Propaganda and Ideological Legitimation
Populist regimes also rely on digital propaganda to frame their control as moral and necessary. In Türkiye, the AKP aligns its censorship practices with Islamist narratives, presenting online repression as a defense of public morality and religious values. Pro-government trolls, often organized through digital militias, routinely target opposition figures, journalists, and academics with harassment campaigns. This manipulation polarizes society and promotes a pro-government narrative.
In India, the BJP’s digital strategy fuses Hindutva ideology with populist mobilization. Coordinated networks, often led by the party’s IT cells, amplify Hindu nationalist content, discredit critical media, and orchestrate online harassment of dissenters, especially Muslims and liberal intellectuals. These tactics enable the government to justify legal crackdowns on free speech as necessary to preserve order and national identity.
In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s government used social media to spread propaganda and undermine democratic institutions. The digital landscape saw aggressive misinformation campaigns on platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, often targeting electoral authorities, journalists, and opposition leaders. Continuous attacks on the press and opposition, and conspiracies spread by government-aligned influencers diminished public trust in democracy.
Hungary’s Fidesz party also uses institutionalized methods of digital propaganda. Pro-government media outlets, many owned by its business allies, coordinate narratives across television, radio, and online platforms to amplify government positions and marginalize dissenting voices. Social media campaigns, often supported by state resources, discredit opposition parties and civil society groups, reinforcing a pro-government information environment. Additionally, Fidesz has employed a subtler but complex strategy that led to the capturing of state institutions, which now guarantees the regime’s stability.
Digital Clientelism and the Control of Social Services
Digitalization of welfare delivery systems has given populist regimes new tools for political patronage. In India, Aadhaar‘s integration into welfare schemes enables the central government to directly deliver subsidies for food, gas, and pensions, bypassing local governments. While this reduces opportunities for petty corruption, it also allows the central government to selectively target benefits and monitor recipients, particularly activists and communities involved in dissent. This dual role of Aadhaar as welfare infrastructure and surveillance tool poses serious threats to civil liberties and democratic dialogue.
In Türkiye, the shift from e-government to “smart government” has deepened executive control. Integrated databases link healthcare, education, and migration records. Refugees and vulnerable populations are particularly affected: their biometric data is tied to their access to services, and the government uses this system to manage and discipline these groups. The result is a form of digital clientelism where access to state services becomes contingent on visibility, compliance, and political passivity.
Countering Digital Repression
Faced with these powerful digital arsenals, civil society actors, journalists, and legal institutions are developing resistance strategies. The effectiveness of these varies, but they offer critical points of friction in otherwise tightening authoritarian environments.
In India, the rise of digital labor, gig work on platforms like Ola and Swiggy, and the broader platformization of the economy have opened new spaces for resistance. Gig workers’ unions have used social media to organize strikes and expose exploitative data practices, challenging state-corporate narratives. Legal resistance is also strong: groups like the Internet Freedom Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center have contested the 2021 IT Rules, which mandate traceability of encrypted messages and broader content takedown powers. Simultaneously, digital literacy campaigns and independent news outlets like The Wire and Scroll counter online propaganda and foster pluralism.
In Brazil, civil society resists the political manipulation on social media, which has polarized society but also energized opposition movements. Organizations like Sleeping Giants Brasil campaign against companies that advertise on disinformation-spreading platforms. Fact-checkers such as Aos Fatos and Lupa have increased visibility, and digital rights groups have mobilized to push for transparency in platform algorithms and electoral integrity online.
In Türkiye, alternative media platforms like Teyit.org and Dokuz8Haber fact-check state narratives and document digital censorship. Opposition politicians and activists use encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram to organize. Legal resistance is more limited due to the weakening of judicial independence, but international human rights organizations frequently intervene to challenge digital repression.
Hungary presents a more constrained environment for digital resistance, but investigative journalism outlets like Átlátszó and independent media like 444.hu continue to expose tech-enabled corruption and surveillance. Recent protests sparked by the ban on LGBTQ+ events also raised concerns about the government’s concurrent expansion of facial recognition powers, with civil liberties groups and younger digital rights activists warning of their potential use to monitor and intimidate demonstrators.
These forms of resistance are fragmented and often suppressed, but they signal ongoing contestation. Legal challenges, media literacy, and civic innovation together form an emergent counterweight to digital authoritarianism, even in hostile contexts.
What Works and What Does Not
Across these four regimes, digital authoritarianism has proven flexible and adaptive. Its strength lies in the ability to blend infrastructural control, ideological legitimation, and clientelist governance, all enabled by digital technology. Yet resistance persists in the legal sphere, civil society, and digital activism. Successful resistance strategies often share key features. First, they build alliances between legal, journalistic, and civic actors. Second, they leverage transparency and international norms. Third, they adapt to platform dynamics with speed and creativity.
Where resistance struggles is in scale and sustainability. Authoritarian populist regimes are not only more agile than their challengers, able to deploy new surveillance tools quickly and fragment opposition through digital polarization, but they also set the regulatory frameworks that govern digital space. This allows them to legitimize restrictive practices and close off institutional pathways for resistance, making technological adaptation alone insufficient to counter their control. Still, understanding how these regimes govern digitally and how people push back is crucial to building a more resilient civic sphere. The digital battlefield is not neutral. It is being shaped, contested, and repurposed daily.
*******
Author:
Gülşen Doğan is a PhD candidate in political science and international relations at Koç University. Her research focuses on populism, democracy, multi-level governance, and migration diplomacy, with a comparative emphasis on Brazil, Hungary, and Türkiye.
The AUTHLIB consortium does not take collective positions. Publications only represent the views of their individual authors.
*******
Photo credit: AlinStock via Shutterstock
