Is social media threatening democracies across the world through misinformation?

While social networking platforms remain integral across the global democracies for media convergence, public opinion, and freedom of expression without the state’s inference, censorship, and reprisals, over the recent years it has contributed to polarization, populism, biased facts, divisive political rhetorics, and manipulation, threatening the very fabric of democracy. Leading social media platforms, particularly Facebook operated by the parent company Meta owned by the tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and microblogging site Twitter now operated under the newly Indian origin CEO Parag Agrawal not only have turned the biggest source of hate propelling and disinformation but have also failed to regulate the “biased against facts” flow of information. 

A 2020 media manipulation survey from the University of Oxford institute on Friday, Dec. 17 found evidence in each of the 81 countries surveyed. Organized social media manipulation campaigns online was up 15% in one year across at least 70 countries in 2019, a report compiled by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) suggests, adding that governments, public relations firms, and political parties produce a large scale of misinformation, particularly with respect to the political communication. OII team warns that the level of political manipulation across Facebook and Twitter has risen tenfold with governments and political parties spending millions on private sector ‘cyber troops' that manipulate the citizens' opinion spending $10 million on an average towards social media political advertisements.

“Our report shows misinformation has become more professionalised and is now produced on an industrial scale. Now, more than ever, the public needs to be able to rely on trustworthy information about government policy and activity," Philip Howard, director of the institute and the report’s co-author said in the report. 

A 'breach' of democratic procedure; new tactics of foreign influence 

During the 2020 Presidential elections, social media platforms Twitter and Facebook instated an unprecedented ban on the former US leader Donald Trump for his unsubstantiated claims about the ‘election fraud’ that led to the violent insurrection in the United States Capitol. In an apparent display of breach of the democratic procedure, the mob attempted to halt the certification of the democratically elected President of the United States, Joe Biden. 

Under public pressure, Twitter and Facebook then indefinitely banned the former US President’s official social media accounts citing the political context of emergency and national security, which the latter argued was a gory violation of his human rights and freedom of speech. Geneva Press club also discussed at length the impact of such a move on democracy as such measures taken by the social media giants is the impediment to freedom of expression. 

“We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company, and Facebook must work harder at ensuring the tools it creates are used in 'good and healthy' ways." —Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

Over the past several years, Facebook and Twitter have also been accused of resorting to new tactics of foreign influence to manipulate voters via a network of fake and automated accounts. In 2010, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was acquired by the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica without the knowledge or consent of the users for political advertising via an app "This Is Your Digital Life”. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal involved 87 million Facebook profiles harvested through the platform for analytical assistance for the 2016 US presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. 

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media platform Facebook after the data leak scandal. 

Political parties such as the Republicans and Democrats have been criticized for inflating their popularity by creating hashtags and trends linked to their political parties, thus maliciously influencing the democratic voting systems. The world’s most polarizing political figures also employ social media platforms for pushing their agenda via artificial bots and fake accounts. According to the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report, the Russian conspirators meddled in the 2020 US elections, hampering the democratic process by spreading discord, lies, and disinformation to at least 100 million voters on social media platforms. 

'Sweeping and systematic' effort to undermine democracies

Russian government and firms linked to Kremlin used a "sweeping and systematic" effort to undermine Americans' confidence in their democracy, the Mueller report reveals citing the federal investigators. Former director of the FBI, and law enforcement officers from the Trump administration, who was named as a special counsel to investigate Russian collusion said during his testimony before a pair of House committees that Russian operatives hacked their way into local voter registration systems without actually tampering with vote tallies but by launching a mass political campaign to sway the American citizens’ opinions of politicians and the US political system using the trolls and hacking into accounts. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray also confirmed the undermining of the American democracy with the Senate Judiciary Committee, stressing that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” to help elect Trump via an online political campaign. A Facebook representative also testified at the US Congress, stating that at least 470 Russian-controlled accounts collectively made 80,000 political posts between January 2015 and August 2017 to influence the voting of over 126 million people, as per Facebook’s estimates. 

Twitter similarly in 2018 published an update that there were 3,814 accounts online operated by the Russian government outfit Internet Research Agency (IRA) that attempted to influence political opinion by tweeting 175,000 times, reaching 1.4 million Americans. The threat to democracy from social media is largely due to the unregulated content, ineffective design and enforcement of fair policies, and lack of authenticity of the millions of existing accounts