Replication Data for: How Saudi Crackdowns Fail to Silence Online Dissent

Saudi Arabia has imprisoned and tortured activists, religious leaders, and journalists for voicing dissent online. This reflects a growing worldwide trend in the use of physical repression to censor online speech. In this paper, we systematically examine the consequences of imprisoning well-known Saudis for online dissent by analyzing over 300 million tweets as well as detailed Google search data from 2010 to 2017 using automated text analysis and crowd-sourced human evaluation of content. We find that repression deterred imprisoned Saudis from continuing to dissent online. However, it did not suppress dissent overall. Twitter followers of the imprisoned Saudis engaged in more online dissent, including criticizing the ruling family and calling for regime change. Repression drew public attention to arrested Saudis and their causes, and other prominent figures in Saudi Arabia were not deterred by the repression of their peers and continued to dissent online.

沙特阿拉伯曾因在线表达异见，对活动人士、宗教领袖与记者实施监禁及酷刑。这一现象折射出全球范围内以肉体压制手段审查网络言论的趋势正不断抬头。本研究通过自动化文本分析与众包内容人工评估方法，分析2010年至2017年间超3亿条推特（Twitter）推文及详细谷歌（Google）搜索数据，系统性考察因在线表达异见被监禁的知名沙特人士所引发的后续影响。研究结果显示，肉体压制使得被监禁的沙特人士不再继续在线表达异见，但从整体层面而言，该压制并未遏制异见发声。被监禁人士的推特（Twitter）关注者反而更积极地在线表达异见，其中包括批评王室家族及呼吁政权更迭。此次压制行动引发了公众对被逮捕沙特人士及其诉求的关注，而沙特其他知名人士并未因同伴遭遇压制而却步，仍持续在线表达异见。