Social Media and Authoritarian Legacies: the Impact of Military Aligned Social Media Activists (SMAs) on Politics.

This paper explores the connections that social media (SM) users develop with social media activists (SMAs) aligned with a politically active military organization, and how this connectedness influences their political behaviours, using a survey data (n = 501) from Pakistan. Partial least square (PLS) structural equation modelling was used to test the conceptual model, which demonstrates that the citizen's connectedness with military related SMAs was significant and positively associated with their online political participation and voting realignment during 2018 general elections in Pakistan. The results further revealed that the offline political activities were strongly related with online political participation in Pakistan. The study brings novel insights into the military's use of social media and its impact on electoral politics during the post-authoritarian period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]