Walking Through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context

The early hopes of the internet as a technology “liberation” have turned into reinforcing spiral control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments those that seek to bypass censorship digital repression. This reflects even most robust mechanisms are vulnerable circumvention, which has become key concept for illustrating contemporary online communication experience citizens. Yet, scholarship examining underlying motivations what influences individuals employ circumvention technologies (CCTs) in contexts remains underdeveloped. We present theoretical model how state-sponsored political identity attitudes about media freedom influence motivated resistance case using CCTs access social other forms content networked context Iran. Employing web-based survey users ( N = 807), we test this across range censored types. Our findings show regime ideology Iran indirectly CCT use through biasing perceptions people respond it form resistance. discuss policy-related implications resilience contexts.