Does Social Media Harm Democracy?

Since the invention of the printing press, technology has had a major impact on society and politics because technological advancements continue to widen the flow of information which people use to form their opinions and guide their actions. One result of the printing press for example, was the creation of the newspaper, which unified large regions of people by giving them faster access to the same information, creating commonality and discourse between common people in villages that did not previously communicate. The increase in communication strengthened the idea of a nation, which contributed to early European state formation. Fast forward to the 20th century, modern media companies have become established and provide the instantaneous distribution of information to all members of a community who choose to read, listen, or watch. Even still there are barriers, as powerful corporations have complete autonomy over which stories to promote and which to suppress. Enter social media in the 21st century, which at first appears to be a grassroots way to spread information which created communities of people all over the world. As social media has rapidly gained popularity, it has gained significant influence on social and political structures, recently surpassing that of more traditional media sources. Major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are now at “the center of political information-seeking and agenda-setting, two fundamental processes of democracy,”1 which is an issue because these platforms are not government offshoots but private companies with business models that prioritize profit over benefit to the public good. The result is that in elections over the past seven years, social media companies have been embroiled in activities that harm the democratic process because of their profit maximizing algorithms and the sale of user data to third parties. Therefore there is a pressing need for accountability and global legal regulations to reduce the future threat they pose to democracy, since digital media is continuing to hold significant power in social and political affairs.

Social media started out as a seemingly pro-democratic creation. Major platforms were the first place where information could be spread to a far-reaching global audience instantaneously by regular individuals. This represented a shift away from the flow of information being controlled by media giants such as cable news stations and newspaper publishing houses. Before social media, the things people learned were the things those corporations wanted you to know about. That is not to say that all scandals could be effectively swept under the rug because different media corporations catered to varied audiences and would report conflicting sides of issues, but that there was a huge barrier between individuals being able to communicate issues of importance, including their personal thoughts, to other individuals. The introduction of major social media communication platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, broke down this barrier and enabled a much freer flow of information. An essay published by Project MUSE explains why this was regarded as something that strengthened democracy: “social media give[s] a voice to those whose views are normally excluded from political discussions in the mainstream media. With social media, people can find like-minded compatriots, organize protests and movements, and support political candidates and parties. In short, social media solves collective action problems that have long bedeviled those traditionally shut out of mainstream politics. This can include prodemocratic forces, of course. Social media can give them new means of holding governments accountable and pressing for wider political inclusion; hence the early and hopeful talk about “liberation technology” as a feature of the digital age.”2

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg received Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award. The paper claimed that Facebook will “tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family.”3 Six years later, in 2016, Donald Trump was awarded the same title from Time Magazine. From Zuckerberg’s cover to Trump’s, the way we interact with and understand social media platforms has changed. In the wake of the 2016 and 2020 elections, it would be very controversial to claim that the internet feels anything like a ‘family’ and especially that Facebook is a ‘friendly’ and ‘serendipitous’ place.

Dr. Joshua Tucker, coordinator of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics claims that social media entered the political sphere highly regarded as pro-democratic tool because it facilitated collaboration for those organizing against authoritarian regimes.4 For example, a 2009 revolt in Moldova against communist leaders was facilitated by tags and groups on Facebook and Twitter. The result was shockingly massive protests that gained global attention and forced the government to spring into action.5 In 2013, a Sage Journals article written by political science professors analyzed a survey from the 2011 Russian Duma election that found Facebook in particular, as “instrumental in disseminating information about the protests” for citizens that contested the integrity of the election.6 Tucker claims that the shift in media away from pro-democracy facilitation came first from authoritarian leaders that began to block, censor, and imprison those that used social media in opposition to their regimes. Eventually they started attempting to influence what was left of online political discourse by implementing bots and trolls that spread misinformation. That practice has now bled into democratic countries as well. This evolution occurred not because social media platforms are inherently pro or anti-democratic but because of profit.

Most mainstream social media platforms do not have a political leaning because they were created to be profitable businesses. Dr. Akin Unver, a contributor to The Journal of International Affairs delves into how the business model of social media companies hurts democracy by promoting misinformation and cultivating extremist pipeline bubbles. He states that “The foundation of the contemporary digital media system rests on the monetization of digital attention through metrics that emphasize engagement, such as likes, comments, and retweets, which, as a social behavioral trend, tends to cluster around emotionally-charged, extreme content.”1 This combines behavior psychology, regarding the innate human reaction to emotionally charged content, with marketing strategies for political advertisements. People are more likely to interact with a radical, emotional, or graphic post, which means that it will be propelled towards more users by social media algorithms, so it becomes more advantageous for a business to create extreme content, including completely fabricated material, regardless of the political impacts. This type of algorithm is highly conducive towards bots and trolls. Bots and trolls are automated accounts that are programmed to drown out rational arguments and unity efforts on social media by flooding hashtags, replies, and timelines with information that is intended to cause divisions among the real users who see their content. Twitter admitted to over 50,000 accounts that tweeted automated material about the 2016 United States election were linked back to Russia.7 The United States House Intelligence Committee Minority published that over 3,000 advertisements on Facebook were bought by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), commonly referred to as the Russian Troll Farm, which reached more that 11.4 million American Facebook users. The IRA also created 470 Facebook pages that posted 80,000 pieces of content, reaching 126 million Americans.8 While the exact number of Americans that were influenced by these fraudulent accounts will never be able to be quantified, these significant figures imply that many Americans likely were. Dissemination of misinformation on such a massive scale is extremely alarming as Donald Trump only beat Hilary Clinton by 1.2% or less in four key states that led to his electoral victory.9 Had algorithms on Facebook and Twitter been more concerned about facts rather than clicks, it is easy to question if the 45th US President might have been different. Unver states that “the fundamental problem of digital space is its main currency, attention, which calls for a new political economy model properly contextualized in global politics.”1 This calls out the tech media giants, blaming them directly for implementing dangerous algorithms that don’t filter false or misleading news but actively promote it as long as it is receiving attention, which is why action must be taken to force platforms to take accountability and face regulations to stop their dangerous, and essentially unchecked current power.

Although accountability for social media platforms themselves through reforms to their algorithms work to address the threats social media brings to democracy, there is another crucial factor. The extensive data collection from user profiles also tampers with the flow of information, which results in the creation of echo chambers or “informational bubbles” that promote narrow worldviews and result in social and political fragmentation.10 One prominent example of this is found in the work of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting organization. In 2015 it harvested data from a Facebook offshoot application called This is Your Digital Life. It took personal data from the 270,000 Facebook users of the app, but also reached into the networks of those users and ended up acquiring data from almost 87 million Facebook users, most of whom did not give Cambridge Analytica direct permission for this collection. The firm claimed to be Donald Trump’s key to winning swing states by using the data it collected to target users with advertisements that would appeal to their specific demographic and needs, although Brad Parscale, the digital media director for Trump’s campaign, denied that assertion.11 Cambridge Analytica used the engagement driven algorithms to spread their specially curated, emotionally-evocative ads that were created after analyzing the personal information of millions of social media users, most of whom had no idea that such data was even being collected in the first place. This threatens democracy because of the biased way it steers key fundamentals of the democratic process, like agenda setting, into the jurisdiction of those with the most money, who can pay for the data analysis and subsequent advertisements.

Cambridge Analytica has been hired by political actors in many other countries and used similar tactics. In Kenya, the firm worked for incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta, who faced a re-election against long-term rival Raila Odinga in 2017. It targeted younger voters on social media through fear-mongering and misinformation. Samer Ahmed, the founder of Odipo Dev, a Keynan IT Consulting firm, told CNBC the social media advertising played a pivotal role in the 2017 election because it was the first time a “critical mass of the voter population was exposed to the internet and social media” and the country’s Facebook users had almost doubled since the previous election. By collecting data about this demographic, Cambridge Analytica was able to create targeted content to appeal to these users to sway their opinions. One popular video in particular, labeled misinformation because of its depiction of Kenya as a post-apocalyptic society under Odinga’s leadership, was traced back to Cambridge Analytica.12 The CEO was suspended from the firm after executives were filmed explaining their process of psychological manipulation, false information campaigns, and espionage tactics they used in Kenya. Those activities sound much more like the lengths one would expect an authoritarian regime’s leaders would take in order to control their population, and not what democratic leaders should do because the foundation of democracy is popular sovereignty not power-hungry orchestration.

Dr. Benedict Anderson, a scholar who changed the way nationalism is studied in political science, claims that nations are “imagined communities.” The way these imagined communities come to fruition relies on common language and discourse among its members.13 Therefore social media is causing damage to national communities all over the world by polarizing political discourse. Having predictable algorithms that focus more on engagement than anything else increases the impact of bots, trolls, and other sources of fake information. Furthermore, social media companies collect and sell the personal data of their users, which gives marketing companies demographic information to make their extremist content even more effective, which along with the algorithms, pushes social media consumers into narrow-minded “bubbles” that cause division among the voting population. The problem with social media in this context has little to do with real human users and accounts. Increasing censorship, surveillance, and retribution for individuals who post things that do not align with popular sentiments and are even viewed as ‘false’ by the majority is not the answer. Authoritarian regimes already do this, and if democratic governments follow suit they too will be infringing on the freedom of expression of their constituents, not attempting legitimate resolutions for the problems outlined in this essay. Instead, governments need to implement data protection policies that protect real user accounts from being harvested and targeted by companies that actively spread misinformation to achieve a certain electoral outcome rather than promote the democratic process. The European Union and California have already taken action on this route with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act, respectively. These laws require businesses to be more transparent about the data they collect and how it will be used, as well as giving consumers the right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information. In 2019, even Kenya signed a Data Protection Bill to “place restrictions on the collection and use of digital data by government and private corporations.”14 The increasing commonality of such regulations is important as social media platforms try to become, once again, spaces where community members control the content that is on their timelines and therefore the flow of information, rather than foreign or domestic political actors with personal agendas.

However, the most comprehensive reform requires these giant platforms to take accountability for the type of content their algorithms promote, and take action to reverse the reward for general engagement that facilitates the significant ramifications of bots and misinformation. In an ideal world, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google would take it upon themselves to shift away from the monetization formulas they have created. Admittedly, that is unlikely to happen in the near future. The best realistic course of action, as suggested by media experts at an MIT Sloan conference in 2021 includes some tangible changes. One is a call for increased transparency on how algorithms access user information because it would give members of the public a better understanding of how they can be used maliciously and the ability to create prevention tactics. MIT Professor Sinan Aral points out that if there was more competition, the current dominant platforms would feel more pressure to increase data protection and consider algorithm reforms. The EU has just passed a new law, the Digital Markets Act, effective November 1, 2022, that will attempt to do just that by penalizing companies that engage in “unfair business practices” such as “ranking their own products or services higher than those of others.” But Aral mentions another crucial step forward is implementing these kinds of laws, on a global scale. Implementation in just the United States or the European Union is simply not enough.15

Major social media platforms have proven to pose serious threats to the future of democracy through their fundamental structure as businesses and changes must absolutely be made. Whether they should be by the companies, by governments, by international lawmaking bodies, or a combination is not yet perfectly clear. However there is one thing that is certain: as important as reform is, it must not come through censorship, at the expense of the individual right to freedom.

Works Cited

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