‘We’ve been through this before’

Despite certain reelection, Cambodia’s longtime autocratic prime minister, Hun Sen, deployed a team of Facebook trolls to spread disinformation and threaten his opponents ahead of general elections in July. It was nothing new for Hun: In power from 1985 until handing power to his son after the election, Hun’s party first built a “Cyber War Room” to manage social-media propaganda a decade ago. It was nothing new globally, either: Almost as long as social media has been around, authoritarian rulers from the Philippines to Turkey to Russia have understood they can manipulate it to undermine elections.

Meanwhile, misinformation, disinformation, and outrage have become commonplace on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media platforms everywhere—including in the world’s most developed democracies. In 2016, a Russian campaign to spread lies and sow doubts about the U.S. presidential election got sustained global media attention. And in 2018, a former Facebook manager testified to the U.S. Congress that the company had internal records documenting how some had used the site to propagate false information and foment violence leading up to and during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Yet democratic life has been under pressure across the West since before social media was widespread at all. In the United States alone, partisan polarization and rancor have been intensifying since before the internet entirely. And around the world, as Freedom House has reported, there’s been a pronounced decrease in measures of democracy for 17 years straight. Social media can’t be the cause of all this. So what’s the connection?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell is the author of Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—and What We Can Do About It. Rose-Stockwell says the rise of social-media platforms has affected democratic life in a number of ways. Displacing the traditional news media’s role in creating public narratives about the news—not least, political news—social media hasn’t just diversified those narratives; it’s effectively shattered any of the common understandings of current events a vital democracy needs. At the same time, the work of the traditional news media itself has been increasingly conditioned by social-media platforms, often reporting on viral content from them as news—and often with the low accuracy and high indignation common to them. The platforms meanwhile rely on algorithms to decide what content to promote, and these algorithms typically boost content that relies on moral and emotional anger to attract and retain attention—and bring in advertising revenue, putting moral and emotional anger at the heart of their business models.

None of this means democracy is doomed, Rose-Stockwell says, or that social media can’t be reformed. In fact, the modern West has been tested in similar ways before—and succeeded in transforming dysfunctional viral networks into powerful knowledge networks …

Michael Bluhm: On a lot of indicators, democracy’s been in decline across the economically developed world for more than a decade and a half—longer than social media’s been around. How do you see the specific challenge it’s meant for democratic life?