Social Media Is Killing Democracy

In Brazil, a crowd of supporters of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms. “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” the crowd yelled. “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!” They were crediting the platforms with their victory, and they were not entirely wrong. During that campaign, a conservative pro-business interest group funded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook).

Damaging and false information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent, included fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote.
This deluge,  played a large role in Bolsonaro’s victory. The glee Bolsonaro’s supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one that SHOULD be familiar to Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies. Many observers have noted that entrenched authoritarian states, like Russia and China, have gotten very good at manipulating these platforms to marginalize domestic dissidents and destabilize democracies abroad. What’s gotten less attention is how authoritarian factions inside democratic states — far-right politicians and parties that are at best indifferent to democracy, benefit from the nature of modern social media platforms. Authoritarians of  all sorts benefit from spreading falsehoods about their opponents, they create panics about minority groups, and undermine people’s trust in credible independent media. Both the 2016 US election and the 2018 Brazilian vote proved social media is a perfect cheap tool for manipulating an increasingly gullible public.

Social media has the potential to help pro-democracy movements at times, but these platforms  overall serve far-right extremists and authoritarians.  Once seen as democracy’s ally, these platforms have increasingly become its enemy.

Why?

 It is easier to spread misinformation on social media than to correct it.
It is easier to inflame social divisions than to mend them.
The very nature of how we engage with Facebook and the rest now helps far-right, authoritarian factions weaken the foundations of democratic systems — and give themselves an easier pathway to seizing power. This is the unfortunate and sad uncomfortable truth:
Social media, in the way that it exists at this moment, is an authoritarian medium.

Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto’s tech-focused Citizen Lab wrote in the The Journal of Democracy (one of the premier academic venues for analyzing the current state of democratic politics). “It seems undeniable, that social media must bear some of the blame for the descent into neo-fascism.”

In 2009, Iranians rose up to protest against a rigged election, the so-called “Green Movement” using Facebook and YouTube clips of protests to spread their message globally. Two years later, the Arab Spring protests showed the true power of these mediums, as protest movements that made skillful use of social media for coordination and messaging toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.
At that time, the consensus among observers was that social media was, by its very nature, democratizing. Social media facilitates the swift spread of information, allowing citizens to get around government censorship. Social media allows rapid communication among large groups of disparate people, giving citizen activists new tools for organizing actions.
We had every reason to believe the spread of social media would necessarily weaken authoritarian states and strengthen democracies.

This theory turned out to be partly true: It can be difficult to simply repress the spread of information on social media. But as we’ve come to discover, it’s even more difficult to repress the spread of disinformation.

A savvy person or political party looking to discredit online critics doesn’t need to ban their speech to disable it. Instead, they can create a deluge of false or misleading information, making it very hard for ordinary citizens to figure out what’s actually going on.

Deibert’s essay usefully summarizes a number of different studies documenting how well the twisted jiujitsu of misinformation and information overload works:


An always-on, real-time information tsunami creates the perfect environment for the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, rumors, and “leaks.” Unsubstantiated claims and narratives go viral while fact-checking efforts struggle to keep up. Members of the public, including researchers and investigative journalists, may not have the expertise, tools, or time to verify claims. By the time they do, the falsehoods have already embedded themselves in the collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, freshly baked scandals and outlandish claims are continuously raining down on users, mixing fact with fiction. Worse yet, studies have found that attempts “to quash rumors through direct refutation facilitates their diffusion by increasing fluency.” In other words, efforts to correct falsehoods can ironically contribute to their further propagation and even acceptance.
The constant bombardment of tainted leaks, conspiracy theories, and other misinformation in turn fuels public cynicism, with citizens growing fatigued as they try to discern objective truth amid the flood of news. Questioning the integrity of all media — one aim of authoritarianism — can in turn lead to a kind of fatalism and paralysis.

The WhatsApp propaganda in Brazil is one example of the effect Deibert is talking about. A well-funded campaign to spread false information was extremely difficult for Bolsonaro’s opponents and Brazil’s independent press to expose or discredit. The falsehoods these messages spread likely became truth in the eyes of a significant percentage of people who encountered them, many of whom would never see rebuttals and wouldn’t believe them if they did.

Donald Trump and his allies in the more unscrupulous parts of the American conservative movement employ a similar strategy. The president lies, a lot; while the mainstream press debunks him, right-wing outlets spread those falsehoods or manufactured supporting evidence on social media, where these lies cement as fact in the eyes of the president’s hardcore supporters.

Even my feed this morning was full of junk news going viral, claims that the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal was identified (Absolutely untrue) and thanks to photoshop, was posing with all the democrats involved in the impeachment...that Adam Schiff was some sort of pedaphile (Quickly and easily debunked, but it won't matter...people who want to believe that, saw the posts, spread them further amongst their groups and no amount of fact checking will matter to them...it's now part of their mythology...their belief system.)

A recent study found that conservatives were more than four times as likely to share fake news on Facebook as liberals. Another study, from researchers at the University of Oxford, found that conservative users were overwhelmingly more likely to spread “junk news” (defined as outlets that “deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information”).
“On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share,” the Oxford researchers write. “Extreme hard right Facebook pages share more junk news than all other audiences put together.”

The phenomenon goes  far beyond the US and Brazil.
The far right has made huge inroads through most of Europe.
Marie Le Pen, and actual unabashed fascist very nearly won the French Presidency...and may yet win in the next election. The rise of the Tories and Brexit in England. Fascists rising even in the post-fascist nations of Germany and Italy where we once thought it would not be possible.
The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte cultivated an online fan base — even bringing popular social media influencers into his government — that’s known for “patriotic trolling”: sending hate messages to his critics and spreading smears about them. The Philippine news site Rappler identified a network of more than 12 million pro-Duterte propaganda accounts on various platforms, reporting that, led to a concerted smear campaign against the site from Duterte’s fans. An #UnfollowRappler social media campaign cost the site tens of thousands of  followers, a huge hit for an online publication that depends on clicks to stay profitable.

Social media isn’t the only reason far-right populists have been able to win elections.
There are all sorts of other reasons, ranging from ethnic divisions to economic injustice to anxiety about crime or the weakness of the political opposition that these leaders have exploited in their rise to power. While it would be absurd to blame technology for this phenomenon, it would be equally absurd to ignore it's role.  The global challenge to democracy from within isn’t social media’s fault, yet the major platforms do seem to be making the crisis worse. The platforms by their nature allow far-right politicians to marginalize opponents, consolidate their base, and exacerbate the social divisions that helped them rise to power.

Russia’s Internet Research Agency (often abbreviated to IRA) has been a formidable troll factory for the Kremlin. It has displayed a mastery of postmodern disinformation techniques for fomenting polarisation, distrust and confusion in target populations of social media users.
 The New Knowledge report studied 10.4m tweets, 1,100 YouTube videos, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 61,500 unique Facebook posts published from 2015 to the end of 2017.
It found that the IRA created social media accounts under fake names on every available platform – not just Facebook and Twitter, but also Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+. One of the most surprising revelations was the extent to which the IRA used Instagram to sow distrust and discord, which suggests that Russian trolls have a good working knowledge of western hipsterdom. Aside from polluting the minds of partisans, even the most reasonable sincere citizen, devoid of political affiliations; is bombarded with so much junk 'news' that eventually they disengage to protect their sanity.
Make no mistake, the Russian troll factory is hard at work right now as you read this. Their successes globally in 2016 and 2018, and the acceptance, even welcoming; of this interference by the hard right factions and even the US Senate, has emboldened not only Russia, but China, Iran, Turkey, the Saudi murderous regime, as well as North Korea to step up their trolling operations.

 Renée DiResta, one of the lead researchers in the study, had this to say: “In official statements to Congress, tech executives have said that they found it beyond their capabilities to assess whether Russia created content intended to discourage anyone from voting.
We have determined that Russia did create such content.
It propagated lies about voting rules and processes,
attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates
and created stories that advocated not voting.”

 What does all this mean?

It means that the world has changed, and that democracies are in a new ballgame.
Manipulation of  media environment by foreign as well as domestic dishonest actors is now the new normal.
If anything has changed since 2016, it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s now the terrain on which the entirety of political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape the everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are endless.
Until we either secure that ground or replace it entirely, we should expect many more attacks, each one in a slightly different form, and each leaving us with even more doubt that what we see reflects reality.  Or, to put it more succinctly: social media poses an existential threat to the kind of liberal democracy we like to think we have.


There is an urgent need to gain a deeper understanding of the widespread decline of democracy and the unnerving movement toward dictatorship in the 21st century.
We are confronted by serious and unexpected challenges to our freedoms and human rights.
By the end of this century, the United States, the European Union, and other societies that are at present relatively open may be overtaken economically and or militarily by China and other dictatorships. Closed societies might well become the dominant global powers and the ones that set the norms around the world. Open societies are not only facing threats from the outside.
 The election of Donald Trump and the rise of populist far-right “strongmen” (leaders who use threat, intimidation, displacement of aggression onto minorities, and various other tactics that undermine democracy) movements in a number of countries signal threats to open societies from the inside.
The recent history of authoritarian strongmen, including Hitler (1889–1945) and Mussolini (1883–1945), who for a time enjoyed wildly popular support, is not promising in terms of preserving open societies. Of course, as Federico Finchelstein pointed out, the fascism of the 1930s is different from the populism of the 21st century, just as the strongmen of the 1930s are in some respects different from Trump and other 21st-century strongmen. Yet make no mistake, 1930s fascism and 21st-century populism have in common the direct threat to the free press, rule of law, and democracy. Social media may be a threat to democracy even without the bad actors and their manipulations. The nature of how it works can be problematic...read about that here.




We need to gain a deeper understanding of threats to democracy in the context of globalization, the increasing economic and cultural integration of societies around the world, and the international populist backlash that is sweeping across national boundaries. No doubt, the threat to democracy is to some degree linked to the excesses of free-market capitalism, but the role of social media as a tool to suppress voter turnout, create and expand turmoil, and spread disinformation is integral.
 There is an irrationalist dimension to 21st-century populist antidemocracy movements, and it requires analysis. The solution at this time is unknown. Expect it to be far worse for numerous reasons in 2020. The saboteurs are emboldened by the results they achieved with minimal effort...those efforts will be stepped up. Nothing has been done to discourage these attacks on our elections at all. I'd expect far more bold manipulations this time including attempts to change votes cast.  What can we do? Well our institutions are failing us miserably. Be very vigilant and very skeptical...but be active. Be a real citizen. Don't fall for deceptive troll content. Be weary of any posts that promote division. Fact check, and consider the sources. Are they reputable?  Is it corroborated?
Be well...and do the right things. That is what defeats the saboteurs.