Essay: Social Media – Democracy, A Win-Win or A Lose-Lose Situation in Modern World

[An essay belonged to a bigger topic on “A blessing or a curse? How democracies should deal with social media.”]

“If a republic be small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it be large, it is ruined by an internal imperfection.” wrote Montesquieu (Montesquieu). Considering democracy as a large republic, social media is an internal imperfection, especially in the time of modern democracy. The question is whether this imperfection is offensive to democracy. The openness and easy-to-access nature of social media facilitate the potential of “mass collaboration” (Leadbeater, 2008). In terms of democratic culture, implementing control or fact-checking at a large scale is almost impossible. Therefore, democracy should focus on educating citizen-users and raising their online literacy than on controlling social media because social media is merely a tool that can be used for a good or bad cause depending completely on its user.

Democracy provides an ideal environment and conditions for social media to flourish; to be exact, social media is a product that vividly depicts the essence of democracy which is freedom. As its name suggests, social media were born for everyone and people are free to share their ideas, opinions, and criticism without restraints. Those are the core elements of free speech. Most importantly people feel heard when they “speak” online and “how much heard” can be visualized by numbers such as shares, likes, comments, reactions, or tweets. Moreover, social media have become so popular thanks to its open accessibility and instantaneously attracted billions of users; there are about 3.81 billion active users globally with the most popular social network being Facebook (Clement, 2020). Having been an eminent part of such a huge community, several parties see opportunities and are taking advantage of the principles of democracy and trying to be benefited from the nature of modern social media platforms. Democracy is usually referred to in the context of politics in which social media has gradually become an authoritarian medium (Beauchamp, 2019). This “truth” is understandable but not easy to accept. The two most undeniable examples of it are: the winning of President Bolsonaro who successfully led a well-funded campaign to spread false information about his opponents using WhatsApp propaganda in Brazil (Isaac & Roose, 2018); President Trump of the United States won the presidency by using the social networks, mainly Facebook and Twitter (Bump, 2018). Even though Mark Zuckerberg has always refused the heinous role of Facebook in the election(s), the answer to whether Facebook is capable of influencing the results is obvious to many.

Democracy should not try to deal with social media but instead, learn how to live with it. Social media itself is not necessarily bad. They connect people, facilitate movements, and make information acquisition more friendly. However, everything comes with a price, and so do free speech and democracy. How much freedom of free speech is too much? Is there true “free” speech on social media when more and more people are concerned about: (1) the interference of big corporates which try to manipulate users with paid content to serve their interests; and (2) the rapid spread of false information? Currently, there are no good solutions to these two issues. Trying to control can create counterintuitive effects. Mark Zuckerberg once argued that: “In a democracy, I don’t think it’s right for private companies to censor politicians, or the news.” (Vaidhyanathan, 2019). Here comes the danger of spreading false news. Comparing false information on social media to COVID-19, people can either choose to study what it is and its consequences or simply accept what appears on social media as “facts.” The virus itself might not be as dangerous as the ignorance of people. A lot might argue it’s the users who decide to believe the news or not. There is nothing wrong with this argument. However, through this perspective, it’s important to mention collective consciousness.

Collective consciousness, once seen as one of the prominent factors making Homo sapiens superior to other species (Harari, 2015), has increasingly become a disadvantage of the modern era.

It can be used to explain why people are more attracted to false news and spread it more rapidly. We might be suspicious of a piece of information until our friends share it. Humans normally think in groups (A.Sloman & Ferbach, 2017). It is also human nature to think we know more than we do although we know very little. We do not process knowledge alone but in the minds of others (A.Sloman & Ferbach, 2017). In a research review about “Automation, Big Data, and Politics,” Samantha Shorey and Philip N. Howard collected several interesting facts, such as: in 2008, during the election of Mr. Barrack Obama, the former president of the USA, Facebook launched the “I’m voting” button—a nudge to promote voting that generated voting behavior data for millions of people (Sifry, 2014). Later, big data research based on 61 million Facebook users indicated that the positive social pressure of the voting button encouraged friends to do the same (Bond et al., 2012).

Social media users are coming from different backgrounds and use platforms to serve their interests. They have their own stories to care about, some carry with them the stories of survival. A user in the Philippines will see news from a different perspective than a user in the USA does. Putting effort into identifying and studying what is misleading and what is authentic is not their priority. It takes one second to hit the share button while it might take days or months to study a matter to come to a conclusion. It is impossible to stop people from seeing false news, but it is possible to educate people to increase their rationality before sharing something. It could be on a personal level but it’s doable.

To survive the information war of the 21st century, democracies must raise the digital literacy of the users focusing on helping them to understand artificial intelligence and data science. For example, news displayed and shared multiple times does not mean it is true; it’s all about algorithms and automation. Due to the immense amount of users worldwide, raising digital literacy would be easier in some countries than in others. Programs could be implemented in varied forms such as adding a compulsory subject at school for kids or designing appealing courses, be it online or offline, for adults. The reason this seems to be easy but takes “forever” to realize is that it is but a national issue, it has far reached the international level. When talking about the issues related to social media, the first and foremost solution to be proposed is to put constraints on institutions owning big data such as Facebook. However, there has been no consensus on vetting content and limiting “the power” of social media, especially in democratic countries and territories. The question is whether we should wait for social media to be constrained or take action to educate ourselves today.

Is social media a blessing or a curse? No matter what the answer is, it would be dangerous to exploit social media or absurd to blame it. The wisest thing to do is to have individual rationality, to understand the rules of the digital world, and to be responsible for the content we share so that we do not become a “slave” or a “tool” of social media.

Reference
A.Sloman, Steven & Ferbach, Philip. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017; Green, Mortal Tribes, op. cit.
Beauchamp, Zack (January 22, 2019). Social media is rotting democracy from within.
Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/22/18177076/social-media-facebook-far- right-authoritarian-populism. Accessed on May 27 2020.
Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61 million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295–298. http://doi.org/10.1038/nature11421
Bump, Philip (March 23, 2018). All the ways Trump’s campaign was aided by Facebook, ranked by importance. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/22/ all-the-ways-trumps-campaign-was-aided-by-facebook-ranked-by-importance/. Accessed on May 27 2020.
Clement, J. (May 18 2020). Social media – Statistics & Facts. Statista, https://www.statista.com/ topics/1164/social-networks/. Accessed on May 30 2020.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York: HaperCollins Publishers, Chapter 2: The Tree of Knowledge (pp 20-39), 2015.
Isaac, Mike & Roose, Kevin (October 19, 2018). Disinformation Spreads on WhatsApp Ahead of Brazilian Election. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/technology/ whatsapp-brazil-presidential-election.html. Accessed on May 27 2020.
Leadbeater, C. (2008). We-Think, Profile Books, London.
Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws: Book 9, http://www.constitution.org. Accessed on May 30 2020.
Sifry, M. (October 31, 2014). Facebook wants you to vote on Tuesday: Here’s how it messed with your feed in 2012. Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/canvoting- facebook-button-improve-voter-turnout

Vaidhyanathan, Siva (November 02, 2019). The Real Reason Facebook Won’t Fact-Check Political Ads. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/opinion/facebook- zuckerberg-political-ads.html. Accessed on May 30, 2020