Digital Authoritarianism and Its International Diffusion: Nigeria’s Exposure to Foreign Internet Control Models

This dissertation investigates the mechanisms through which digital authoritarian practices originating in China, Russia, and other states have been diffused to or adopted by Nigerian state institutions, examining the normative, institutional, and technical pathways through which foreign internet control models have influenced Nigeria's domestic digital governance. Digital authoritarianism, understood as the use of digital technologies to control populations, suppress dissent, and monitor citizens, has been identified as a globally diffusing governance technology with serious implications for democracy and human rights. Nigeria's internet governance trajectory, including the Social Media Bill debates, the Twitter ban of 2021, and successive regulatory actions by the National Broadcasting Commission and the Nigeria Communications Commission, suggests selective adoption of elements of digital control. Drawing on technology diffusion theory, international norms of authoritarian learning, and digital rights scholarship, this study employs a qualitative analysis of Nigeria's digital governance decisions from 2019 to 2024, tracing the institutional sources, normative justifications, and technical implementations of contested internet governance measures. Primary data are drawn from regulatory agency documentation, parliamentary committee records, interviews with Nigerian digital rights advocates, and analysis of technical evidence from the NetBlocks internet monitoring project. The dissertation makes an original theoretical contribution by developing the concept of selective authoritarian diffusion to describe how democratic states with authoritarian tendencies strategically adopt discrete elements of digital control without wholesale adoption of authoritarian internet governance architectures, maintaining formal democratic legitimacy while expanding surveillance and speech control capacity. Keywords: digital authoritarianism, Nigeria, internet governance, diffusion, digital rights.