The US has taken a more middle-of-the-road stance, largely leaving choices to private companies. Daymude and his co-authors set out to examine these strikingly different tactics. To do so they built a computational agent-based simulation that represented how people balance the desire to express dissent against the fear of punishment. The model also captures how an authority modifies its surveillance and policies to suppress dissent while keeping enforcement costs as low as possible.
“This isn’t some kind of learning-theory thing,” said Daymude. “And it isn’t grounded in empirical survey data. We didn’t go out and ask 1000 people, ‘What would you do if faced with this situation? Would you dissent or self-censor?’ and then feed those answers into the model. Our model lets us encode certain assumptions about how we think people generally behave, and then lets us vary parameters. What happens if people are more or less bold? What happens if punishments are harsher or milder? If an authority is more or less tolerant? From those basic assumptions we can make predictions about likely outcomes.”
Let a hundred flowers flourish
Their model indicates the most extreme scenario is an authoritarian regime that adopts a draconian punishment policy, effectively quashing dissent across the population. “At that point, everyone’s best strategic move is simply to stay silent,” said Daymude. “So why doesn’t every authoritarian government on earth just do that?” That question pushed them to probe the dynamics more deeply. “Maybe authoritarians begin somewhat moderate,” he said. “Maybe they only reach that extreme outcome through incremental changes over time.”
Daymude points to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s as a telling example. There, Chairman Mao Zedong initially encouraged open criticism of his government before suddenly cracking down harshly when dissent escalated. The model showed that in such a situation, dissenters’ self-censorship increases gradually, ultimately producing near-total compliance.
But there’s a caveat. “The reverse of the Hundred Flowers is that if the population is bold enough, this approach fails,” said Daymude. “The authoritarian can’t find a route to become fully draconian. People stubbornly continue to dissent. So each time it tries to increase severity, it’s committed to that escalation because dissenters remain present and vocal. They’re essentially saying, ‘Catch us if you dare.’”
