MDC Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy Case Study

The philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke
of the relentless drive of technology as the world and its objects
become victim to humanity’s calculations and designs. But technology’s
indeterminacy implies an uncertain future since we cannot predict where
this drive will take us. A recent evolution of information technology
has been social networking. Social networking fuses together the
multimedia world described by Marshal McLuhan with virtual reality, and
it displaces the real world with an artificial one. The person now
dwells more extensively in an environment of texting, selfies, chats,
Instagram photos, newsfeeds, and blogs. There was some apprehensiveness
about the power of social media well before the immense popularity of
Facebook and Twitter became a reality. But few could have foreseen that
social media would also become a means
for spreading misinformation and magnifying political partisanship.

Techno
optimists once argued that social media had the potential to become a
great stimulus for democracy because it amplified the powers of free
speech. When Facebook and similar platforms first appeared, many
sincerely hoped that they would give voice to the marginalized in
society. People with different and unconventional viewpoints could
locate each other and mobilize to advance their interests. But while
these results have been realized to some extent, these sites have also
become purveyors of “fake news” along with vast amounts of
disinformation. The term “fake news” has been popularized by President
Donald Trump, but it was coined by Buzz Feed’s Craig Silverman.
For some, the proliferation of all this “fake news” and other forms of
online abuse has wiped away the great promise of the internet as a force
for semiotic democracy.

During
the 2016 presidential election there was considerable disinformation on
the web, along with heavy manipulation of information about the two
presidential candidates, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. This abuse
wasn’t supposed to happen on this democratizing technology, at least not
on this scale. But decentralized networks with no controls can become
powerful tools in the hands of extremists and opportunists. News sites
appeared printing sensational stories that were neither vetted nor
verified. For these sites, which sought eyeballs to attract ads and
generate revenues, there was little incentive to avoid misinformation
and the diffusion of propaganda.

Consider
the “fake news” entrepreneurs in Macedonia who created a number of
pro-Trump websites. They adroitly imitated actual news sites and
disseminated very partisan news stories that attracted Trump supporters.
Their website domain names included worldpoliticus.com and
trumpvision365.com. The sites published pro-Trump stories aimed at his
supporters in the United States. These young Macedonians had no interest
in advancing the candidacy of Mr. Trump. Rather, their sole interest
was in attracting readers, since the volume of readers on their websites
translated into greater advertising dollars. They also recognized that
the best way to generate online traffic was to get their stories about
the Trump campaign to spread on Facebook. Most of the websites had
Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. The more
sensational the content, the more attention the story got among Facebook
followers. And as Facebook engagements increased, so did their readers
who were attracted by their outlandish propaganda stories. For example,
within a week a spurious story from Conservativestate .com, “Hillary
Clinton in 2013: I Would Like to See People Like Donald Trump Run for
Office; They’re Honest and Can’t Be Bought,” generated 480,000
reactions, comments, and likes on Facebook. Virtually all of the stories
on these websites made false and misleading claims.

The
spread of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation has become an
epidemic in cyberspace and threatens to strike at the heart of the
democratic process. Disinformation is the deliberate communication of
false or misleading information, while misinformation is the
communication of information without an intent to deceive. Often those
who disseminate misinformation have evidence that is indirect or
obscure. Democracies depend heavily on accurate and objective
information so voters can make informed choices. Fake news misleads
voters and contributes to the further polarization of political parties.
According to one political strategist, fake news disseminated on social
media is “the biggest political problem facing leaders around the
world.” This hyperbolic statement reflects the inability of governments
to deal with fake news narratives except through draconian measures that
are anathema to democracy.

But
fake news is not the only problem that bedevils social media. As the
leading social media platform, Facebook found itself at the center of
multiple controversies that involved the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. In March 2018, the British newspaper, the Observer, along with
the New York Times first revealed that a researcher had gained access
to the personal data of Facebook users for Cambridge Analytica, a
consulting firm hired by the Trump campaign. The researcher, Alexander
Kogan, created a Facebook app and invited Facebook users to take a
survey and download the app that harvested their Facebook data along
with the data of their Facebook friends. That data included names, birth
dates, and location data as well as lists of every Facebook page they
ever liked. And these data were downloaded without their knowledge or
consent and added to a massive database being assembled for Cambridge
Analytica. This political data firm has particular expertise in
developing persuasive ads using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate
voter preferences. By examining behavioral data such as what people
“liked,” it was possible to map out personality traits that could become
the basis for targeted ads. The personal data of 87 million users had
been mined in this way, and Facebook was aware of this activity since
December 2015. However, it said nothing to its users or to U.S.
regulators until the media published this story. Facebook has claimed
that Cambridge Analytica collected these data under false pretenses. The
scandal led to many questions about how Facebook monitors the apps
deployed to collect its user information and whether data should ever be
made available for psychological profiling for political purposes.

Facebook
has also been an unwitting catalyst for violence in vulnerable parts of
the world. Facebook entered Myanmar, a country unfamiliar with the
digital world, and was unprepared to deal with its deep political and
social divisions. Facebook seemed unaware of how its platform could be
manipulated and abused by extremists who could easily sway a naïve
population. In this country, Facebook was the internet, since most users
only had mobile phones with Facebook already installed. Buddhist
extremists wasted no time in using social media to spread disinformation
in order to inflame ethnic tensions against the Muslim Rohingya
minority. One of the country’s leading Buddhist monks ignited a deadly
riot when he disseminated a fake news story of a rape and warned of a
“Jihad against us.” According to one NGO, Facebook’s platform was used
for a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanize[d] Muslims.” By
March 2017 a million Muslims had fled Myanmar into Bangladesh. Facebook
monitors missed many posts full of disinformation that helped to spark
this ethnic cleansing. Moreover, when the tragedy intensified, Facebook
was quite slow to react and remove hateful content, despite
repeated
warnings from multiple sources. It also did little to prevent fake
accounts from being created. Zuckerberg himself recognized the company’s
tardiness, as the people of Myanmar wondered why a company with
Facebook’s resources could not have reacted more expediently.

In
his defense to this series of crises, Zuckerberg has insisted that
fakes news is much less common than people imagine. He attributes the
company’s mistakes and missteps to an excessive optimism and a lack of
awareness of how some Facebook customers misuse their service. But some
analysts are quick to point out that while this explanation has some
merit, it ignores the company’s fixation on rapid growth and an
unwillingness to heed warnings from outsiders.

The
company has made some concessions. For many years Facebook did not
disclose the sources of funding for political ads. But now users can
find out on Facebook who paid for a political ad and whom the ad
targeted. The company is also considering ways to “impose friction” to
impede the spread of disinformation and misinformation. (Perhaps pop-ups
with warnings such as “Do you really want to share this item?”).
However, it is exceedingly difficult to control election propaganda or
slow down the spread of disinformation, short of draconian censorship
measures. With 2.7 billion people using Facebook’s services, monitoring
content is the most difficult challenge facing the company. Yet fake
news is a threat to liberal democracy, and Facebook must find a way to
deal with users who share these false or barely credible news posts. On
the other hand, it is perilous to have a small group of social media
companies determine what kinds of political speech people will see.
Hence the social media world faces a paradox: a greater emphasis on
truthful news and communications will lead to limits on free speech,
while too much speech opens the door for flows of disinformation and
reckless propaganda.

How can social media strike the right balance between these two competing objectives?