OUR DIGITAL DEMOCRACY IN THE ANALYTICA AGE
HOW TO SECURE OUR DIGITAL DEMOCRACY IN TIME FOR THE US AND UK 2024 ELECTIONS
Fake news is up; democracy is down. Multiple parliamentary reports from the past 4 years have concluded that the two are inextricably linked- it is clear that to save democracy we must preserve truth in online spaces.
The threats that our democracies face are complex and multi- faceted. A lethal cocktail of privacy violations, filter bubbles and fake accounts spread hate speech and disinformation.. The result? Democratic freedoms are on the slide.
“Elections are fought online, not through the letterbox. We must act now to combat digital campaigning and safeguard our democracy,” declared Damian Collins MP in February of 2019. Collins MP’s speech was given when revealing the findings and policy suggestions of the UK Parliament’s 2 year-long investigation into social media, fake news and Russian disinformation during the 2016 Brexit referendum. The report revealed mass disinformation campaigns conducted by both Leave. EU and Russian intelligence to sway voters in favour of leave, whilst highlighting the joint criminality of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Leave. EU in psychologically profiling and micro-targeting 87 million UK & US citizens through Facebook without their consent.
This is not a phenomenon unique to the UK. Democratic freedoms are shrinking as lies and hate speech are allowed to triumph over truth. Our failure to stop disinformation agents from damaging democracy has led to the election of multiple corrupt, nationalist governments in countries with traditionally high levels of individual freedom and trust in the information supply.
In USA (Trump), UK (Johnson), Brazil (Bolsonaro), India (Modi), Hungary (Orban), and Poland (Duda) - countries where Cambridge Analytica- installed leaders have taken charge - significant backslides into authoritarianism have taken place where civil rights have been eroded, activists against corruption & human rights abuses have been attacked and jailed, and the rule of law has been repeatedly broken at both national and international level by the governments in power, with little to no retribution for citizens via the democratic process.
The inability for citizens to resist corrupt regimes occurs when there’s not enough collective political capacity to investigate, prosecute, and hold accountable the perpetrators of political and financial crimes. Political capital comes from the collective discussion of evidence and truth, and it is for this exact reason that Cambridge Analytica was created, why exploits in current social media networks exist, and why the future of our democracy relies on us stopping small groups of powerful actors from using social media to misinform, divide and conquer us.
One only needs to look to The Great Hack (playing now on Netflix) for a succinct overview. It showcases Cambridge Analytica in their own words, demonstrating their methods for spreading disinformation on social media first hand. The governments installed by Cambridge Analytica have been able to maintain levels of populist support necessary to win elections, whilst constantly lying to their citizens, eroding civil liberties, and breaking the rule of law, by operating the largest disinformation campaigns of all time via social media networks. They have done this using three exploits in social media’s model which we must fix in order to stop them.
1. The ability for armies of millions/billions of fake accounts on social media
to spread disinformation & directly interfere with electoral processes
2. The ability to psychologically profile and micro-target hundreds of
millions of citizens with disinformation
3. The ability to defund & deter journalism using co-ordinated abuse
campaigns, hacktivism, and shadow banning
To resolve this, Mr Collins’ has proposed the following:
“We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people. The age of inadequate self-regulation must come to an end. The rights of the citizen need to be established in statute, by requiring the tech companies to adhere to a code of conduct written into law by Parliament, and overseen by an independent regulator.”
Unfortunately Facebook is currently immune to this policy suggestion; regulators across the world are underfunded, paid off, and are thus incapable
of taking on a trillion dollar tech giant. The answer must therefore come from
the private sector. We need a social media network that has all of the following
features.
- All social media users should be digitally ID verified. One person, one voice on social media is critical to preserving digital democracy, and by removing bots and trolls from social media we will reduce spread of disinformation by 90%.
- Privacy rights are human rights, social media’s ad model should protect users
privacy. All data for ad targeting should be consented first party data with 24/7
user access to alteration and deletion within the social media app. This prevents hostile third party actors like Cambridge Analytica from psychologically profiling and micro-targeting you.
- Algorithmic transparency & control. Social media users should have access to their algorithms and be able to consciously engage and alter them. Users should be able to create multiple custom algorithms and switch between them at any point, thus breaking the filter bubble-sphere.
- Disinformation should be labelled and engagement prohibited. Combination
of internal and external crowdsourced fact checking to prevent conspiracy, deep fakes and hate speech from spreading
- Users should be rewarded for the value of their data, and content creators should be able to directly monetise their content on social media. Using cryptocurrency social media can redistribute profits directly to content creators, compensating them fairly for their work. 75% of US newsroom and journalism jobs have disappeared in the last 15 years, we need content monetisation built into social media to refund grassroots journalism. We need to make 1,000 likes $100 not $5.
To secure our 2024 elections we must secure our information supply and thus
our digital democracy by connecting citizens via a new, secure social media
network with these features.
