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Abstract
The expansion of digital governance raises urgent concerns about the relationship between state technological capacity and the protection of digital civil rights, particularly in emerging democracies. This study offers a novel comparative examination of Indonesia and Nigeria, investigating how government cyber capacity relates to three dimensions of online political control: social media monitoring, censorship, and arrests for political content. Drawing on country-year data from the Digital Society Project (DSP) v7 covering 2010–2024, the study employs descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression. The findings reveal that Nigeria exhibits more intensive online political control than Indonesia, as reflected in its lower DSP scores across all three indicators. Regression analysis identifies a significant positive association between government cyber capacity and social media monitoring scores (β = 0.45, p < 0.05), indicating less restrictive monitoring under DSP coding. These findings challenge assumptions that stronger digital state capacity necessarily intensifies political surveillance. The study contributes to comparative digital governance scholarship by demonstrating the conceptual distinction between technological capacity and political control, while highlighting the importance of rights-based governance frameworks that reconcile digital transformation with freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic accountability.
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