The years of almost unfettered enthusiasm about the benefits of the internet have been followed by a period of techlash as users worry about the actors who exploit the speed, reach and complexity of the internet for harmful purposes. Over the past four years – a time of the Brexit decision in the United Kingdom, the American presidential election and a variety of other elections – the digital disruption of democracy has been a leading concern.
According to the research by Pew Research Center in December 2020, about half experts expressed human’s use of technology will weaken democracy in the next decade. The article will investigate the harm brought by digital to democracy from two main aspects. The first ties to the view that democracy is at risk because those with power seek to maintain their power by building systems that serve them, not the masses. Dahlgren suggests elites’ control over technology systems gives them new tools and tactics to enhance their power, including by weaponizing technology.1 The growing imbalance further erodes individuals’ belief in their agency and impact as actors in their democracy, which causes some to give up on democracy, ceding more control to the elites.
The second concern links to issues around trust. Contucci worries the rise of misinformation and disinformation erodes public trust in many institutions and one another, lowering incentives to reform and rebuild those institutions.2
First section: Monopolism
Theme 1: Empowering the powerful
Akrivopoulou demonstrated that corporate and government agendas generally do not serve democratic goals and outcomes. They serve the goals of those in power.3
As corporations gain more control and freedom, they are able to more effectively harness their resources to manipulate public perceptions, which is done for profit at the expense of the public's ability to understand the world, relate to one another constructively, feel valued and have some control over their circumstances. The corporations have the resources to fully engage big data to leverage individual preferences and habits into structured sales and influence campaigns that can effectively manipulate the opinions and behaviors of the common man.
The political marketing based on that benefit and antidemocratic forces amplified by it will create an environment of concocted stories (often reflecting conspiracy theories) targeted in hyper-personalized ways.
The situation will make it virtually impossible for the press and civic groups to track and/or challenge lies or highlight accurate claims effectively.
This will put corporations in control of the top decision-makers and the majority of the public and result in a new-age oligarchy. The monopolist regime and the gaping power asymmetry between platforms and users will collapse democracy, and replace it with the oligarchy that has been feeding the masses.4
Theme 2: Diminishing the governed
Digitally networked surveillance capitalism creates an undemocratic class system pitting the controllers against the controlled.
Large technology companies have adopted the ‘surveillance capitalism’ model. They collect large amounts of data about people, and then profit from the data in multiple ways. They also engage in ‘attention-maximization’ techniques, using the body of data to cleverly incite more and more consumption of their services, and also more and more surrendering of personal data. Most technology markets evolve into a winner-take-all future. Surveillance capitalism is not an exception. More data implies more power over the user, and accrued advantage for further data collection. This leads to a concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, where the ‘data lords’ of surveillance capitalism have as much respect for democracy as yesterday’s feudal lords.5
Therefore, technology subsumes citizen democracy by replacing informed choices with behavioral modification in the service of profits and capitalism. Without a major shift toward community-owned and controlled platforms, society will become increasingly split into controllers and the controlled.
Theme 3: Exploiting digital illiteracy
Citizens’ lack of digital fluency and their apathy produce an ill-informed and/or dispassionate public, weakening democracy and the fabric of society.
Platforms are easily manipulated by actors who oppose democracy and factions within democracy, which voters are usually not mature enough to see in real time. 6 The dangers of social media/IT are aggravated by the degree to which large segments of the population seem to be lacking the skills needed for democracy (ability to listen, think critically, gather data, weigh sources and empathize), because when voters lack these abilities, they become extremely easy to be manipulated.6 Political manipulation has always been a problem, but the scale and complexity of manipulation through social media have raised this threat to a new level.
Without better technological literacy and better public awareness campaigns, technology has the potential to weaken democracy by reinforcing opinions people already hold and thus polarizing societies, creating a chaos of information that makes it harder to discern truth – especially if people gravitate toward self-reinforcing information.7 At a minimum, that could lead to greater voter apathy, polarization and a sense that any one vote does not matter.
Second section: Trust
Theme one: Sowing confusion
Digital media overwhelm people with a sense of the complexity of the world and undermine already-shaky public trust in institutions, governments and leaders.
Instead of more-informed citizens, often people are less informed: manipulated by partisan propaganda increasingly custom-targeted to its unwitting recipients;8 trolled by sophisticated organizations sometimes as arms of foreign governments (pioneered by Russia – its successes will surely spark other countries to spend greatly on copying and refining its techniques); sucked in by fringe movements that appear onscreen as equal to the well-developed mainstream institutions that provide long-term stability to societies; force-fed more information consumed with less thought; and so on. Many people even seize simplistic unworkable solutions offered by actual and wannabe tyrants. Add to this the ease of spreading false information and the difficulty of formulating effective regulations for a global system and it is difficult even to envision a positive outcome.
Peters & Broersma suggested increasingly people may be unable to have shared understandings of the world.8 Civility in civic discourse and integrity are increasingly quaint notions. At the same time, the mass public is already at a point when even educated citizens in First World societies are unable to distinguish fact from fiction.9 The booming misinformation infestation is eating away citizenship and democratic institutions, along with the crumbling trust of people over the democratic system.
Theme two: Weakening journalism
There seems to be no solution for problems caused by the rise of social media-abetted tribalism and the decline of trusted, independent journalism.10
Digital media are breaking the filtering and editing processes of journalism - which accommodated some of the public’s cognitive limitations and biases in ways that made democratic public spheres generally tractable for citizens - and this erodes the epistemic basis for democracy.
The role once performed by professional journalists to weigh and sift the different claims made by different voices now has been entirely abdicated by the big content providers, such as Facebook and YouTube. These platforms allow people to find the ‘information’ with which they are most comfortable and reinforces existing tendencies toward confirmation bias.
For instance in politics, considering social and online media, combined with polling and increasingly big data, tilting power away from representatives and toward the executive branch, Dahlgren illustrated the vicious cycle led by technology between the resurrected partisan press of the late 18th and early 19th century and the intensified spin control.1
Meanwhile, because technology enables people to customize the information they receive, there’s no shared sense of the informational or news agenda the way there was when most people got their news from major broadcast networks and from national and local newspapers. Democracy will be harder to support when people do not even have a shared body of information about public affairs about which to debate. And the evisceration of local newspapers and the concentration of ownership of local television stations means that local news, in particular, is going to be less available and less useful.
In conclusion, digital disruption has hurt democracy mainly by advantaging elites’ profit-driven capitalism control over the internet and eroding public’s trust of democratic institutions.
Four correspondent suggestions are introduced below to help technology strengthen core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the future:
1. Evolving individuals: To increase citizen awareness, improve digital literacy and promote better engagement among educators.
2. Adapting systems: Changes in the design of human systems and an improved ethos among technologists will help democracy.
3. Working for good: Governments, enlightened leaders and activists should help steer policy and democratic processes to produce better democratic outcomes.
4. Assisting reforms: Pro-democracy governance solutions should be aided by the spread of technology and innovations like artificial intelligence. Those will work in favor of trusted free speech and greater citizen empowerment.
(1588 words)
Bibliography:
1. Dahlgren, P., 2009. Media and political engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.172-175.
2. Contucci, P., 2019. Future of Digital Democracy. Springer International Publishing, pp.86-89.
3. Akrivopoulou, C., 2012. Human rights and risks in the digital era. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, p.32.
4. Dahlgren, P., 2009. Media and political engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.173.
5. Rhodes, S., 2006. Social movements and free-market capitalism in Latin America. Albany: State University of New York Press, p.27.
6. Gerbaudo, P., 2019. The digital party: Political organisation and online democracy. London: Pluto Press, pp.168-172.
7. Habermas, J., 2010. The public sphere: an encyclopedia article (1964). The idea of the public sphere: A reader, pp.116-120.
8. Peters, C. and Broersma, M., 2013. Rethinking journalism. London: Routledge, p.18.
9. Peters, C. and Broersma, M., 2013. Rethinking journalism. London: Routledge, p.20.
10. Schudson, M., 2020. Journalism. Oxford: Polity Press, p.88.
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