How the Internet Threatens Democracy
How the Internet Threatens Democracy
By Thomas B. Edsall MARCH 2, 2017
As the forces of reaction outpace movements predicated on
the ideal of progress, and as traditional norms of political competition are
tossed aside, it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in
doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and
destroyed institutional constraints on what can be said, when and where it can
be said and who can say it.
Even though in one sense President Trump’s victory in
2016 fulfilled conventional expectations — because it prevented a third
straight Democratic term in the White House — it also revealed that the
internet and its offspring have overridden the traditional American political
system of alternating left-right advantage. They are contributing — perhaps
irreversibly — to the decay of traditional moral and ethical constraints in
American politics.
Matthew Hindman, a professor of media and public affairs
at George Washington University and the author of “The Myth of Digital
Democracy,” said in a phone interview that “if you took the label off, someone
looking at the United States would have to be worried about democratic failure
or transitioning toward a hybrid regime.”
Such a regime, in his view, would keep the trappings of
democracy, including seemingly free elections, while leaders would control the
election process, the media and the scope of permissible debate. “What you get
is a country that is de facto less free.”
Scott Goodstein, the C.E.O. of Revolution Messaging, has
run online messaging for both the Obama and Sanders campaigns. When I spoke to
him in a phone interview, he argued that the internet has been a great thing
for getting additional layers of transparency. It was true for Donald Trump as
it was for Bernie Sanders; the internet ended smoke-filled back rooms,
deal-cutting moved from back room to a true campaign, with a more general
population. Maybe an unwashed population, but that’s the beauty of American
politics with 350 million people.
Goodstein noted, however, “a horrible development on the
internet” last year:
In this cycle you saw hate speech retweeted and echoed,
by partisan hacks, the Jewish star used in neo-Nazi posts. There is no
governing body, so I think it’s going to get worse, more people jumping into
the gutter.
The use of digital technology in the 2016 election
“represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of legacy institutions
that had set bounds for American politics in the postwar era,” Nathaniel
Persily, a law professor at Stanford, writes in a forthcoming paper, “Can
American Democracy Survive the Internet?”
According to Persily, the Trump campaign was “totally
unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics.” He argues that
this type of campaign is only successful in a context in which certain
established institutions — particularly, the mainstream media and political
party organizations — have lost most of their power, both in the United States
and around the world.
The Trump campaign is only the newest beneficiary of the
collapse of once-dominant organizations:
The void these eroding institutions have left was filled
by an unmediated, populist nationalism tailor-made for the internet age. We see
it in the rise of the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Pirate Party in
Iceland. We see it in the successful use of social media in the Brexit
referendum, in which supporters were seven times more numerous on Twitter and
five times more active on Instagram. And we see it in the pervasive fears of
government leaders throughout Europe, who worried well before the American
election that Russian propaganda and other internet tactics might sway their
electorates.
The influence of the internet is only the most recent
manifestation of the weakening of the two major American political parties over
the past century, with the Civil Service undermining patronage, the rise of
mass media altering communication, campaign finance law empowering donors
independent of the parties, and the ascendance of direct primaries gutting the
power of party bosses to pick nominees.
In a forthcoming paper “Outsourcing Politics: The Hostile
Takeovers of Our Hollowed Out Political Parties,” Samuel Issacharoff, a law professor
at New York University, writes about how the erosion of political parties
played out in 2016:
Neither party appeared to have a mechanism of internal
correction. Neither could muster the wise elders to steer a more conventional
course. Neither could use its congressional leadership to regain control of the
party through its powers of governance. Neither could lay claim to financial
resources that would compel a measure of candidate loyalty. Neither could even
exert influence though party endorsements.
The result:
The parties proved hollow vehicles that offered little
organizational resistance to capture by outsiders. And what was captured
appeared little more than a brand, certainly not the vibrant organizations that
are heralded as the indispensable glue of democratic politics.
Issacharoff was even more concerned about the future of
democratic politics in a talk, “Anxieties of Democracy,” that he gave in
February at the University of Texas law school.
“We are witnessing a period of deep challenge to the core
claims of democracy to be the superior form of political organization of
civilized peoples,” he told his audience:
The current moment of democratic uncertainty draws from
four central institutional challenges, each one a compromise of how democracy
was consolidated over the past few centuries. First, the accelerated decline of
political parties and other institutional forms of engagement; second, the
weakness of the legislative branches; third, the loss of a sense of social
cohesion; and fourth, the decline in democratic state competence.
In a phone interview, Issacharoff cited the emergence of
internet-based methods of communication as a major contributing factor in the
deterioration of political parties.
“Technology has overtaken one of the basic functions you
needed political parties for in the past, communication with voters,” he said.
“Social media has changed all of that, candidates now have direct access
through email, blogs and Twitter,” along with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and
other platforms.
Two developments in the 2016 campaign provided strong
evidence of the vulnerability of democracies in the age of the internet: the
alleged effort of the Russian government to secretly intervene on behalf of
Trump, and the discovery by internet profiteers of how to monetize the
distribution of fake news stories, especially stories damaging to Hillary
Clinton.
In an email, Samuel Greene, the director of the Russia
Institute at King’s College London, described his “best estimate” of Russian cyber
hacking under Putin’s guidance:
Teams of hackers, operating with varying levels of
resources and at various distances from the central chain of command, had a lot
of license to poke and prod and see what they could come up with. Some of these
people found it easier to do certain kinds of things — like break into
Podesta’s emails — than they had expected. Having obtained a windfall, they
were then given license to push it even further.
The question now is who benefits more from the digital
revolution and the ubiquity of social media, the left or the right?
Andreas Jungherr, an expert in social and computer
science at the University of Konstanz in Germany, argues that the internet is
particularly helpful to opposition movements. He emailed me:
It seems to me this is not a question about ideological
placement but more about organizational or movement strategy. As long as I am
in opposition, the payoff is higher in investing in digital infrastructure and
thereby channeling the activities and enthusiasm of my supporters than when in
power. So I would expect a re-emergence of political activity, for example in
the form of alternative news sources, on the liberal side in the coming years.
Along parallel lines, Cristian Vaccari, a reader in
politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, argued in an email that
social media have contributed to the sudden emergence of candidates and parties
running the ideological gamut:
By qualitatively expanding the pool of participants,
social media may thus be substantially contributing to some of the vivid
examples of political disruption that we have witnessed over the past few years
across and beyond the Western world: from the spread of protest movements to
the sudden rise of new parties such as the Five Star Movement in Italy and
Podemos in Spain, from the ascent of populist leaders all across Europe to
electoral upheavals such as the Brexit referendum and the surge of Bernie
Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States 2016 Presidential elections.
Clay Shirky is a professor in the Interactive
Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U. In a 2009 TED talk — the full political
significance of which has only become clear over the past eight years — he
described some of the implications of the digital revolution:
The internet is the first medium in history that has
native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone
gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave
us the one-to-many pattern, the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern.
Shirky continues:
The second big change is that, as all media gets
digitized, the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media,
meaning that phone calls migrate to the internet, magazines migrate to the
internet, movies migrate to the internet. And that means that every medium is
right next door to every other medium. Put another way, media is increasingly
less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of
coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something
can now gather around and talk to each other as well.
And the third big change, according to Shirky, is that
members of the former audience can now also be producers and not consumers.
Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as
well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and
produce. It’s as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press
for free; it’s like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed
the right buttons.
There is good reason to think that the disruptive forces
at work in the United States — as they expand the universe of the politically
engaged and open the debate to millions who previously paid little or no
attention — may do more to damage the left than strengthen it. In other words,
just as the use of negative campaign ads and campaign finance loopholes to
channel suspect contributions eventually became routine, so too will be the use
of social media to confuse and mislead the electorate.
Of course, this problem goes much deeper than the
internet. Sam Greene of King’s College London put it this way in an email:
Our politics are vulnerable to nefarious influences —
whether of the Kremlin variety or the Breitbart variety — not because our
information landscape is open and fluid, but because voters’ perceptions have
become untethered from reality. For reasons that are both complex and
debatable, very many voters have stopped seeing government as a tool for the
production of the common good, and have instead turned to politicians (and
others) who at least make them feel good. Thus, the news we consume has become
as much about emotion and identity as about facts. That’s where the
vulnerability comes in, and its roots are in our politics — not in the
internet.
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