Despotic Regimes Instilling Fear in Citizens to Suppress Protests

摘要

Fear of reprisals such as violence and punishment can inhibit citizens from speaking out, or make them more reluctant to act, in opposition to a repressive regime. Protests are one form of opposition, and their growth has been successfully modeled as an inftuence-based contagion process within a social network (representing a population). In these models, an individual joins a protest if a sufficient number of her neighbors has already joined. This required number of neighbors is often called a “threshold.” In this study, we model a regime's ability to suppress protests by instilling fear in a subset of a population, and this fear is manifested by an increase in a person's threshold. We consider different social networks, numbers of seed nodes, and amounts of fear. Through simulations, we present several results. For example, we demonstrate that, for the objective of reducing the size of a protest, inducing fear can be more advantageous than removing nodes from a network.