Social media, surveillance capitalism, and democracy (some preliminary thoughts)

Many people have argued in the late 2010s and early 2020s that "democracy is in crisis" and that "social media is eroding democracy." The evidence usually involves two basic phenomena.

The first is the viral spread of fake news. One study suggested that fake news typically tends to be shared five to six times more than true news, because of the sensationalist nature it generally has. (Or did I just make that up? ;-) Though most of this fake news is "grass roots" action by individuals, there has been some evidence and much concern that fake news is sometimes used in organized campaigns of disinformation.

Along with this kind of less organized mischief, there is the potential for platforms like Facebook to be used to target members with "personalized propaganda" (basically political ads, or politics embedded in ads, but more customized to reach someone like exactly this user, based on the profile dataveillance can build up of them). This kind of disinformation is premeditated propaganda or designed to disrupt and unbalance a society (America is the society we have most recently been concerned about here, of course).

The Cambridge Analytica scandal brought to the public's attention the possibility that third parties could pay to use the algorithmic dataveillance for targeted advertising of this kind, as well as the possibility of external automated tools "mining" people's data using social surveillance. This profiling would then give a propagandist a better sense of how to target people based on what dataveillance and social surveillance suggest about them as a human being.

There is a concern that such technology-based disruptions of the social order will influence our decision-making in elections and has already created further polarizization among voters, as we have seen happen with Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Did Cambridge Analytica or fake news make that happen? Probably not, or not by themselves; but the potential is there. (It's not clear that Cambridge Analytica actually had any impact on Brexit or the U.S. election in 2016. The point is, they said that they could have an impact, and there was a market for this kind of influence. As Yaffa (2020) suggested, perhaps the disinformation is more a symptom than a cause of the unhealthiness at present of some Western democracies.)

I'm not entirely sure that this erodes democracy per se, any more than televised attack ads did before the Internet even existed, or Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. Influence has always been a thing, and persuasion has always been a part of politics. Deception was not invented with the Internet, and disinformation was not thought up and practiced only in the Kremlin (though it certainly seems to have been a big deal there). Democracy as practiced in North America is the idea that everyone has a right to a say in how government works. There is nothing in that basic premise that says people need to be well-informed or impervious to outside influence or even that you shouldn't be allowed to vote if you have been hijacked by propaganda from Russia or QAnon or the Christian Right or Wokeism or whatever you don't approve of.

Though some people think there should be, there is no obligation to be a critical thinker, to be educated, well-informed, rational, compassionate or any other such thing in order to have the right to vote. While the idea of making voting an earned privilege is a tempting one, examples of this from the past are highly troubling. For instance, there were “literacy tests” used in the American south a hundred years ago to keep African Americans from being able to vote. Various methods, including white-based criteria of literacy and cheating on the evaluation of the tests prevented many black people from exercising their democratic rights. It's hard to imagine who would design the tests today to determine whether someone is competent to vote, and bias of some kind would undoubtedly be found in such tests.

What is to be done?

The worry that voters are overly influenced by social media and that social media in turn can be used as a tool of unfair influence usually leads to one of three recommendations: government regulation of social media, voluntary abandonment of social media, or better education about how the media and social media work. Plus training in critical thinking.

Someone like Siva Vaidhyanathan, in Anti Social Media (2019), thinks the best answer is to regulate the corporate platforms that make social media popular today with more government oversight. The government must step in to enforce stricter privacy, stronger data protection, and the enforcement of antitrust and competition law (Meta's monopoly should be broken up; it's not good that one capitalist company owns Instagram and WhatsApp and who knows what else). Vaidhyanathan believes that any political campaigning going on in this empire should be regulated by government scrutinizers and that fake news or other dubious appeals should be taken down or called out by the company itself. As I understand it, Facebook has in fact made some moves or at least gestures in this direction since the well-publicized appearances of Mark Zuckerberg before Senate and Congress in the last couple of years. Certainly in high profile cases, like the Proud Boys and Donald Trump, we are now seeing them act rapidly, but it's hard to know where they will go from here.

The phrase "government oversight" may cause kneejerk reactions in many people. It is quite common to distrust "the government" on principle, and many people seem to have an unquestioned belief that "the government" is somehow trying to control them. But I believe this is a bit of a false or lazy assumption, at least in Canada. Politicians may be very interested in influencing us, but I don't believe there is a conspiracy within government to control its citizens, as there is in 1984 or other totalitarian fantasies (or real totalitarian states elsewhere in the world). On the contrary, the powerful entities with the most "control" of us seem to me to be the corporations, including the media. The government may be the only force powerful enough to challenge or hold them in check.

The second approach to this problem is urging people to unplug, or as the title of Jaron Lanier’s 2018 book puts it, Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Refuse to use the platforms until they reform.

The sometimes bizarrely hyperreal Netflix docu-drama The Social Dilemma (2020) seems to be suggesting this at times in its fictional narratives, and a number of the ex-Silicon Valley heavy-hitters interviewed in the movie say they don't let their own children use social media.

That film doesn't put its hope in the government so much as in public pressure. We need to refuse to use until the platforms reform. The film mixes dramatizations of a "typical" family (white, American, and middle class like all of the Silicon Valley people profiled, except for a black dad thrown in for the sake of good form), and it makes use throughout of Black Mirror-esque science fiction sequences where three guys in a high tech control room watch various social media users' moment-by-moment actions and then hit buttons to influence them. Strangely sensationalist and melodramatic in terms of style, perhaps in an effort to reach a sensation-addicted populace, it mixes these fictionalized bits with important reflections and testaments from smart people with real-life experience in Silicon Valley. What the people have to say is important and generally worth hearing, but the conclusion many of them seem to be pushing toward or stuck with strikes me as wrong-headed. Deleting your social media apps and getting back to the dinner table with your family leaves you disconnected from everything good and progressive that social media can do (which barely gets mentioned by most people in the film). As Tristan Harris puts it late in the movie, technology is "simultaneous utopia and dystopia." I certainly don't want to throw out the utopia with the dystopia.

The third typical answer to the problem of disrupted democracy and manipulated voters is the most democratic one, though also the most difficult, and perhaps it needs to be combined with the previous two. The third answer is education (yay!) and the re-popularization of individual personal responsibility. The big problem when it comes to democracy is not with advertisers being able to target us with tendentious propaganda, but in the readiness some of us have - encouraged, as Neil Postman suggested, by both our elected officials and our corporations - to make important decisions based on images and ads and knee-jerk emotions rather than understanding and thinking about the issues. Only education, good will, and taking oneself seriously as an agent in the world can fight the lazy desire to treat everything as entertainment, or the paranoid will to treat everything as fake and manipulative, or the defeatist assumption that there is no hope of getting to the truth or making a responsible informed decision. (So I won't!) Opting out of your democratic rights doesn't hurt the powers that be. They may well rely on your cynicism to keep them in place.

I am very reluctant to delete my own social media or to encourage others to do it. I think social media could be our best hope for a more truly democratic - or at least humanist and compassionate and just - world, and maybe something we urgently need even to save the planet. There are more ordinary people than there are corporate CEOs or politicians, and in my experience the 99% are more likely to be honest and caring than the people who want and have the power. Social media should be our place. And it does allow us to communicate with one another, to build powerful coalitions, and at times to bypass the lies of politicians and corporate advertisers.

I also agree with Vaidhyanathan, and with many of the people profiled in The Social Dilemma (and many other key critics), that the real problem here is that our most important and powerful platforms - our social "commons" online - are still corporate-run and operating according to the 20th century model of ad revenue from selling people's attention. A major problem with how social media works is the capitalist exploitation of human beings as consumers, markets, and products.

Because of our societal problems and our addiction to media of all kinds, hate speech and sensational fake news are just as good for “growth” and “reach” on these platforms as pictures of your aunt's puppy or viral videos of yodeling prodigies in Walmart. The popularity or viral reach of fake news - five or six times as likely to be shared as true news - points to the deeper problem Postman also identified: the readiness of people to gravitate toward sensationalist thrills, and to want to feel rather than think or understand. When it comes to getting the news and making political decisions, Facebook (or Instagram) may not be the best place for your work to begin and end.

If Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to save the world, he should have turned his empire into a not-for-profit NGO when he still could have. He should have made the platform ad-free; he should not have collected people’s data. This would have greatly diminished the potential for dataveillance-powered disinformation. It would still have been possible to mine our data through automated social surveillance, but there would have been no universal platform to propagandize to us on. At least not through easily purchased ads.

My personal dream is still the establishment of a successful social media platform that is not a capitalist corporation. I think something like Facebook should exist but as an ad-free utility, back to being a "tool" and not a media company. Maybe it could be paid for by taxes, subscription fees, or voluntary contributions. People have been trying this for the last 10 or so years, with mixed but certainly limited success. Most recently, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has set up a spin-off of Wikipedia with the remarkably unsexy name WT:Social. It seems to operate on a “pay-if-you-can” kind of model, or a bit like shareware (get more if you pay).

The problem is getting all my friends and all the other people I follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram over there. I wonder if Facebook would accept ads for this non-profit alternative.

The for-profit platforms we have are among our most important places to socialize and communicate with one another, but they have brought with them the capitalist trappings that the Situationists complained about. What we really need is a genuinely free (non-commodified) platform, like the Internet itself has largely proved to be so far. The Internet is a beautiful unexpected accident. Maybe it came along just when we most needed it. Social media is a powerful tool for the uprising of the marginalized and alienated; it's also a spectacular alternative to capitalist culture, a "gift economy," a marvellous potlatch of creativity and unpaid or minimally-paid labour, crowdfunding and opensource goodness, labours of love. There's no reason our social media platforms shouldn't be like that too. They mostly are, to the extent that we make them. Our shared social virtual world needs to be ad-free, not collecting our data, just a public space that no one owns or monetizes. I’m sure we can make that if we want to.

We might have to start by expecting more from ourselves and each other. Imagine a world in which a global network of informed critical thinkers doing research and having quiet rational discussions about serious matters could be deployed, instead of a global network chock full of emotional knee-jerk responses to hyperreal images, mixed with premeditated attempts to "sell" us things. It might sound utopian, but I do see some of that network operating on the Internet already, and even in an online class at lowly Humber College sometimes. ;-)

Can democracy survive the direct distribution of media power to the people, including to foreign powers, the wealthy, the malicious and now their AI bots? Can it survive the power of capitalism to sell us users as manipulable products to the highest bidder? Can it survive the addictive hyperreality of our current lives? Do we still want democracy? Do we deserve it? Will we fight for it? Social media, for all its flaws and dangers, seems to me like the most obvious place to do so. Or at least to begin. But the situation does seem to be pretty desperate.