Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?
The dangers of the corporatisation of social media
Before entering the “Age of Information”, humanity’s social organisation was exclusively confined to a corporeal reality. Today, it gradually becomes fastened to an abstract realm.
Companies such as Microsoft and Google are clutching their newfound power as the communicative mediators of the 21st century. The value of Facebook Inc has now doubled since 2016, surpassing a market share of more than $760B. The topic of Big Tech continues to slowly encroach upon all areas of political debate, as our personal, political and social identities become perpetually shadowed by a silhouette of algorithms and data. But as the intangible forces of digital networks strengthen, we are led to ask one pertinent question: Is the growing domination of private internet conglomerates threatening democratic prosperity in contemporary liberal societies?
The digital era is reshuffling the constitutions of political expression, introducing new methods by which the public are able to traverse governmental affairs. In lieu of traditional media such as television and print, we increasingly rely on Twitter to break new political paradigms. The networking giant, has arguably solidified itself as the fastest political mediator in the history of the Anthropocene. But more-so, its influence over communication is redefining the relationship between citizens and their elected government leaders, as content moderation becomes increasingly equated with censorship - on both sides of the political spectrum.
On the 6th of January, the illicit attack on the US Capitol building by anti-Biden protestors was largely attributed to a ‘digital’ groupthink, or, more specifically, far-right online social media circles, who used alternative ‘free speech platforms’ to orchestrate their disorderly riots. An event which soon came to resemble that of a coup d’état, resulted in the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block Donald Trump’s social media account.
Public communication is gradually becoming ever-more regulated by privatised corporations, organisations on which we increasingly rely on to report decisions made within the state. The autonomy to break and regulate governmental affairs is now being granted to independent conglomerates, who have historically demonstrated a greater propensity towards fulfilling individualised corporate interests, instead of prioritising efforts to meet the democratic ideal. Most will probably be familiar with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which uncovered the exploitations and data misuse of over 87 million Facebook users, influencing the outcomes of hundreds of elections across the globe. With close links to the Conservative Party, Cambridge Analytica had no consent before choosing to construe millions of social media timelines, manipulating voters on an industrial scale, and infiltrating news feeds with politically-bias content. But despite the inconceivable negligence and injustice at play (details of which we may never exactly know), social and institutional privilege is what first springs to mind when learning that the perpetrators were able to get away, without serving any prison time for their far-reaching digital crimes.
Arguably, transformations within our information environment haven’t occurred in such a profound fashion, at least not since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in circa 1439. Although the internet has produced an unfathomable degree of benefits for human civilisation, such as instant communication and rapid access to knowledge, the line between objective truth and subjective opinion is simultaneously becoming blurrier than ever before, as social media algorithms favour engagement over fact.
Private internet companies are increasingly relying on sensationalism, fake news, and clickbait to drive up engagement, algorithmically situating users into self-affirming echo chambers. The phenomenon which has otherwise been referred to as ‘Blue Feed Red Feed’, is an essential pitfall used by internet companies, who have failed to provide a visible enough baseline regarding scientific truths and universal political facts above the sea information engulfing the society in the contemporary age. As highlighted in Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: “social media connects users with like-minded members, and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in even narrower windowless silos”. The internet has created infinite opportunities to construct reality — and for one, may be interpreted as pushing the democratisation of information beyond our wildest dreams. But the wisdom of the crowd, has overpopulated the information domain to unbounded extents, as we collectively struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Data, when commodified on mass scales, is indisputably becoming one of the most valuable assets circulating in the economy. Jared Lanier, a former Silicon Valley computer scientist, regarded as the ‘father of virtual reality’, has vigorously advocated for the general public to delete their Facebook accounts, fighting for a new system of exchange which envisions users being paid for their personal data. Deteriorating regulations, lower trade barriers and a shifting consensus towards even stronger individualised economic liberalisation, has granted monopolies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google an overarching power to influence the circulation and consumption of all online property, both commercial and political.
In ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, grasps this decennial concern in comprehensive depths. As outlined throughout her book, the conversion of human behaviour into mere data points is achieved through cookie captures on purchasing habits, but also other profitable markers, such as political dispositions, private interests and, increasingly, our physical environments (think Amazon Alexa and Pokémon Go). Transactional user information now symbolises a “behavioural surplus”, which is fragmented and analysed by third parties, packaged virtually as predictability products, and finally re-invested through Facebook’s machine learning algorithms, to be circulated as commodified data. The unspoken imperative of digital culture gives us little choice but to ‘accept the cookies’ and hand over our autonomy to a group of internet oligarchs, who are either tied to, or are themselves, wealthy partisans. The companies we’ve become so deeply dependent on, are threatening our inalienable right to democracy.
Social media apps are additionally employing AI and machine learning to power their algorithms, individualising user timelines intricately and exhaustively, making personalisation the contemporary consensus. In 2019, the United States threatened to ban the application TikTok, which has previously been criticised for its detrimental influences on mental health, its consistent leaks and breaches of data, and its strong possibility in becoming a latent data funnel towards China’s Communist Party. Despite the available studies on screen time, internet conglomerates are still employing consumer psychologists to tune up the compulsivity of their algorithms, borrowing gambling methods from Las Vegas casinos to create intentional “psychological cravings”.
Law violations, across a global political discourse, detrimentally open opportunity to spread incorrect information through Facebook ads, and caps on governmental speech, coupled with a formidable manipulation of mobile applications, leave us questioning where we stand in our unification as one civil body. Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’, are becoming more pertinent than ever before, mirroring the dystopian shifts which now seem to be materialising around us. As a weakening confidence in democratic prosperity plagues the Western world, ungovernable forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic have further decayed all means of social collectivism. ‘Social distancing’ has now entered our everyday vernacular, reaffirming the cataclysmic changes taking place in Britain and the United States, amplifying the political, social and economic shift towards even greater neoliberal individualisation. Big Tech now depends on the data of the public to sustain and drive-up profits, and consistently remain one step ahead of the judiciary system. As the foundations of political egalitarianism are shaken, democratic prosperity stands under direct threat, leaving us questioning the emerging potentials of a highly centralised power structure, as we seep deeper into the “Digital Revolution”.
Words by Teo Canmetin
Illustration by Teo Canmetin