How social media platforms allow politicians to undermine democracy

At the inauguration of the new Brazilian right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters started a surprising song. They did not encourage Bolsonaro, his second, or their party; instead, they recited the names of social media platforms.

"Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!" Shouted the crowd. "WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!"

They attributed to the platforms the victory of their pilot and were not completely mistaken. During the campaign, a conservative business-friendly interest group funded a mbadive misinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular Facebook-owned email application). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro's leftist opponent, including simulated false information that resembled neutral checks of the facts, was spreading like wildfire before the Oct. 8 vote. This deluge, according to a Brazilian expert, played a role in the victory of Bolsonaro.

Supporters of Bolsonaro's joy have exposed a troubling viewpoint, known to many Americans: social media, once viewed as a deeply democratic technology, increasingly responds to the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

Many observers have noted that entrenched authoritarian states, such as Russia and China, have manipulated these platforms very well to marginalize national dissidents and destabilize democracies abroad. What attracted less attention is the way the authoritarian factions in the interior Democratic states – far-right politicians and parties at best indifferent to democratic norms – benefit from the nature of modern social media platforms.

Authoritarians of all types benefit from the spread of falsehoods about their opponents, the growing panic about minority groups and the loss of confidence of people in the independent media. The 2016 US election and the 2018 Brazilian vote proved that social media was the ideal tool for this type of activity.

While social media can sometimes help pro-democracy movements, they generally give an advantage to far-right and authoritarian parties. Allies of democracy, these platforms have become more and more his enemy.

It is easier to spread misinformation about social media than to correct it and ignite social divisions rather than fix them. The very nature of our interaction with Facebook and the rest is now helping right-wing authoritarian factions to weaken the foundations of democratic systems – and even to give themselves an easier path to seize power.

It seems we must admit a somewhat uncomfortable truth: social media, as it is used now, is an authoritarian medium.

How the far right exploits social media

Screenshot of Zack Beauchamp / Vox

the Journal of Democracy is one of the leading academic forums for badyzing the current state of democratic politics. In his latest issue, Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, is studying the role of social media in modern politics. His conclusion is quite dark.

"It seems undeniable," writes Deibert, "that social media must be partly responsible for the descent into neo-fascism."

Ten years ago, Deibert's point of view – now widely shared by journalists and academics – would have seemed absurd.

In 2009, the Iranians rose to protest against a rigged election, the so-called "Green Movement," which used footage of events on Facebook and YouTube to spread their message around the world. Two years later, the Arab Spring demonstrations showed the true power of these media, as protest movements that skillfully used social media for the coordination and transmission of messages to overthrown regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.

At the time, observers were of the opinion that social media was, by nature, democratizing. Social media facilitates the rapid dissemination of information, allowing citizens to easily bypbad government censors. Social media enables rapid communication between large groups of disparate people, providing activist citizens with new tools for organizing actions. The spread of social media would necessarily weaken authoritarian states and strengthen democracies – or at least that's how the argument has evolved.

There were some dissenters, like the scathing writer Evgeny Morosov, but they were widely spread in a summit induced by the Arab Spring. The 2013 issue of MIT Technology Review entitled "Big Data will save politics, Featuring an interview with singer Bono stating that new technologies would be "deadly for dictators".

This theory has in part proved true: it can be difficult to simply repress the dissemination of information on social media. But as we have come to discover, it is just as difficult to suppress the spread of misinformation. The main feature of social media that gives them a democratic promise, the rapid dissemination of information, can be used against democracy through information overload.

A savvy person or political party seeking to discredit online critics does not need to ban their speech to block it. Instead, they can react with a deluge of false or misleading information, making it very difficult for ordinary citizens to understand what is really happening.

Deibert's essay usefully summarizes a number of studies describing the effectiveness of the twisted jiujitsu of misinformation and information overload:

A tsunami of information continuously in real time creates an ideal environment for the spread of lies, conspiracy theories, rumors and "leaks". Affirmations and unfounded stories become viral while fact checking efforts struggle to follow. Members of the public, including researchers and investigative journalists, may not have the expertise, the tools, or the time needed to verify the claims. At that time, falsehoods may have already become part of the collective consciousness.

In the meantime, new scandals or extravagant statements continue to rain on users, mixing reality and fiction. Worse still, studies have shown that attempts "to break the rumors by a direct refutation can facilitate their diffusion by increasing their fluidity". In other words, efforts to correct lies can ironically contribute to their spread and even acceptance. The constant bombardment of soiled leaks, conspiracy theories and other misinformation is fueling cynicism as citizens become increasingly tired as they try to discern objective truth amidst the flow of information. Challenging the integrity of all media – one of the goals of authoritarianism – can in turn lead to a kind of fatalism and paralysis of policies.

The WhatsApp propaganda in Brazil is an example of the effect mentioned by Deibert. A well-funded campaign to spread false information was extremely difficult to denounce or discredit for opponents of Bolsonaro and the independent press of Brazil. The lies that these messages spread have probably become the truth in the eyes of a large percentage of people who have met them, many of whom would never see the rebuttals and would not believe them if they did.

Donald Trump and his allies in the less scrupulous parts of the American conservative movement use a similar strategy. The president lies, a lot; while the mainstream press is debunking it, the right-wing media is spreading these lies or fabricating evidence to support social media, where it is becoming a reality for the president's staunch supporters.

A recent study found that the Conservatives were more than four times more likely to share fake news on Facebook than the Liberals. Another study, conducted by researchers at Oxford University, found that conservative users were overwhelmingly more likely to spread "unwanted information" (defined as outlets "deliberately publishing misleading information, misleading or incorrect ").

"On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of unwanted information, and the unwanted information is the largest proportion of news links they share," the researchers write. # 39; Oxford. "Far right [Facebook] pages – distinct from Republican pages – share more unwanted information than all other audiences put together. "

We see the same phenomenon beyond the United States and Brazil. Rodrigo Duterte, from the Philippines, has created an online fan base, known even for his "influencers of influential social networks", known for his "patriotic behavior": sending hateful messages to his critics and spreading slander to them. topic. The Philippine news site Rappler has identified a network of more than 12 million propaganda accounts in favor of Duterte on various platforms, which has led to a concerted defamation campaign against the site by Duterte fans. A #UnfollowRappler social media campaign cost the site tens of thousands of Facebook subscribers, a resounding success for an online publication that relies on clicks to stay profitable.

Social media is not the only, or even the main, reason why far-right populists have been able to win elections. There are all kinds of more fundamental reasons, ranging from ethnic divisions to worry about crime, to the weakness of the political opposition that these leaders have exploited to gain power. It would be absurd to blame technology for a phenomenon with much deeper political roots.

But if the global challenge to democracy from the inside is not the fault of social media, the main platforms seem to aggravate this crisis. Platforms, by their nature, allow far-right politicians to marginalize their opponents, consolidate their base and exacerbate the social divisions that helped them to gain power. This helps them to act as authoritarian even within the confines of a democratic political system.

"Social media [outlets] not only are they compatible with authoritarianism; it may be one of the main reasons why authoritarian practices are now spreading around the world, "says Deibert.

Why do social media benefit the far right in relation to democracies?

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But it is possible that we have to go even further than Deibert and the studies he quotes. It's not just that social media is helping to spread authoritarian behavior by chance or by chance. Rather, platforms, by their very nature give anti-democratic politicians one step ahead of their opponents.

To understand why, it is useful to divide the use of social media by a politician into two basic types: normal use and abuse. The normal use of social media is simply an online extension of typical democratic campaign tactics: paying ads to broadcast your message or uploading a campaign video to YouTube. Abuses involve the deliberate dissemination of false information, the attempt to undermine trust in established reality, trolling and harbadment.

The normal use of social media can be equally helpful to all politicians, whether they are from the far right or others. But the negative use of social media, as in the Trump and Bolsonaro campaigns, inherently benefits undemocratic political factions over their opponents.

Now spreading misinformation is not necessarily a miracle solution to winning elections. It seems that the abuse of social media has helped Bolsonaro, but the magnitude is not entirely clear. Contradictory studies have determined whether false news had helped Trump win the 2016 elections. A critique of a group of leading interdisciplinary experts, published in the prestigious journal Science Last March, there was still insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of social media abuses in the evolution of electoral behavior. They could be of importance and even a lot; for the moment, we do not know enough.

But the abuse of social media can have more corrosive effects on a democracy. Authoritarians do not only win by broadcasting their own message; they gain by exploiting the conditions in which citizens become indifferent to democratic institutions or actively hostile to them. By striving to increase political apathy and undermine confidence in established institutions, far-right parties are strengthening at the expense of traditional parties.

The abuse of social media can be used to stir up these tensions – essentially bringing oxygen to the underlying social trends that have produced right-wing authoritarians. When false news circulates, no matter who broadcasts it, people lose confidence in the credibility of their social institutions or perhaps even in the very idea of ​​truth in politics. The spread of this attitude disproportionately benefits authoritarian factions in elections and weakens democracies.

Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard of Oxford University published a report last year on the political abuse of social media platforms in 48 countries. They argue that, in each of these cases, the use of tools such as false information and trolling undermines the health of democratic regimes and benefits authoritarians.

"There is growing evidence that social media is being used to manipulate and deceive voters, undermine democracies and degrade public life," they write. "Social media has become the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to become a social control computer tool, manipulated by knowledgeable political consultants and available to politicians of democracies and dictatorships" .

Social media disproportionately serves right-wing politicians in another way: by helping them fuel social divisions.

The far-right parties demonize marginal groups, whether racial minorities, immigrants or even (in the case of Duterte) drug addicts. Their arguments are centered on making these groups frightening and dangerous, and stir up fear and hatred.

The ease with which rumors and false information can be propagated on social networks and the intrinsic difficulty of dispelling these ideas once they are broadcast make them ideal platforms for the dissemination of demagogic messages. You can abuse social media to demonize marginal groups, but it is much harder to do to improve their public image. A study in Germany found that other things being equal, hate crime rates for immigrants were higher in areas where Facebook was used.

Pro-Democrat politicians are much less likely to benefit from this kind of non-liberal messages. Their main supporters are far more likely to hold fundamental democratic commitments to equality and freedom, and will lose their support by fueling prejudices. The more anger there is, the more anti-democratic forces are favored.

An badysis of BuzzFeed revealed that between 2012 and 2017, seven of the top 10 most popular articles on German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Facebook were fake. Merkel is widely regarded as a defender of European liberal values ​​and inclusion, one of the main bulwarks against the far-right tide on the continent. Three of the seven fake articles on the BuzzFeed list were breaches of his immigration record. All of her goals were to make sure that the immigrants looked like threats to Germany and Merkel of disproportionate sympathy.

Social media seems to divide better than to unite, at least when it comes to politics. The overabundance of information, impossible to sort out for ordinary citizens, undermines people's understanding of the world and leads them to retreat to their own prejudices. Social media, as currently used, objectively favors authoritarians.

That's not all bad, right?

Laszlo Balogh / Getty Images

Now, to be fair, there are places where the social media promise of the Arab Spring period has not been extinguished.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has virtually eradicated the independent press, Facebook is a useful tool for citizens who want to counter government propaganda. Citizens opposed to the authoritarian elected in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been able to effectively broadcast anti-Erdogan messages online.

Even in more traditional dictatorships, the democratic potential of social media has not been fully repressed. The Sudanese government was forced to block several platforms in early January in response to a nascent protest movement using social media to spread its message.

But all these examples show that all authoritarian populists, even the most authoritarian, do not control social media. Nothing on Hungarian Facebook makes it more resistant to false information than Brazilian Facebook. It's just that Bolsonaro and his followers have managed to better realize the propaganda potential of social media than Orbán and his side.

It is better to think of the nature of social media as a medium that gives authoritarians an advantage, but not an insurmountable one. This may end up favoring forces that support democracy in certain situations and in the right conditions.

But if both sides have the same skills, the authoritarians should have a boost. The deluge of social media information exceeds the potential of today's platforms for disseminating important information.

Social media is currently functioning as a sort of parody of the clbadic "marketplace of ideas" in the public square. Instead of the best winning ideas in a free debate, there are so many bad ideas that good ideas are simply drowned out.

In August 2018, MIT Technology Review revisited its 2013 coverage of "Big Data Will Save Politics" by publishing a series of tests to determine if technology has kept its promise. The overwhelming conclusion was that the magazine had been far too naive.

"Today," says Gideon Richfield, editor-in-chief, "technology is as likely to destroy politics as it is to save it."