Bigger Picture Politics v.2
How should democracies grapple with the challenges posed by social media?
As I wrote in my first post about bigger picture politics, it seems like a good time to expand our field of vision in order to better understand the turbulent era we’re living through. This can mean pondering old questions in new ways, or contemplating out of the box solutions for challenges. As before, this post is less about offering opinions and more about providing food for thought regarding the future of politics.
This post looks at two stories, both representative of the gargantuan impact the internet and social media have had on society and democracy. Each story shows how voters and elections have been impacted in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. And they raise questions about the challenges facing democracies moving forward.
The Romanian TikTok Election
At first glance, it doesn’t seem that a presidential election in Romania should have much to do with America. But everything is linked these days, and social media has turned politics upside down in just about every country where people have a vote.
If by chance you haven’t heard, the winner of the first round of voting in the recent Romanian presidential contest was an unknown candidate, Călin Georgescu, a far right politician who espoused anti-establishment views and came out slightly ahead of two more mainstream candidates. That in itself isn’t a surprise given the anti-incumbent mood in most democracies of late — except that Georgescu barely ran a campaign, didn’t spend any money, didn’t participate in candidate debates, and hardly registered in pre-election polling. And then won.
OK, it’s not entirely true that he didn’t run a campaign. He did post videos on TikTok. And he did have a fairly robust social media operation, but one that was almost entirely funded and organized by foreign actors.
After the election, Romania released intelligence information showing that 25,000 social media accounts were created in the weeks before the election on Georgescu’s behalf, while others that had lain dormant for years were re-activated. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid to social media influencers to promote Georgescu’s candidacy. There were also thousands of cyber attacks on Romanian election websites.
And all of it was apparently orchestrated from Russia.
Georgescu claims he has no official connection with Russia and there is no evidence so far that he’s lying about this. However, it is true he has praised Putin in the past, questions the value of NATO, and wants to stop foreign aid to Ukraine, so at minimum his views align with Russia’s goals. He is also an anti-vaxxer who isn’t sure the covid pandemic was real. And he campaigned on a Romania First campaign with a pledge to Make Romania Great Again.
It all sounds familiar, yes, but since voters in many countries are in an anti-establishment mood these days it’s not surprising that similar messages would work across borders. Similar themes have been used everywhere from Argentina to Hungary.
But what is important is that a campaign on TikTok funded by Russia was able to exploit grievances in Romanian society and help push Russia’s favored candidate to victory, even though that candidate barely ran a campaign of his own. As former Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana noted: "If Moscow can do this in Romania, which is profoundly anti-Russian, it means they can do it anywhere.”
The evidence of Russian meddling in Romania hit like an earthquake in the country’s politics. Since the money that was poured into the contest ran afoul of the country’s campaign laws, the Romanian Supreme Court annulled the election results and ordered the government to re-run the contest. Then the European Union opened an investigation into TikTok and its role in election interference.
Meanwhile, Romanians themselves are divided — upset over foreign meddling in its election but equally concerned that annulling the vote will set a dangerous precedent. And not only set a bad precedent for democracy, but also turn Georgescu into a martyr and make him more popular than he otherwise would have been.
There is truly no good or easy way forward. All because Russia found a way to intervene in a foreign election through social media.
This obviously has implications for the United States, as well, because while there is no evidence that Russia has actually impacted election results here, there is certainly ample proof going back eight years that it has utilized social media to amplify grievances, divide Americans, and weaken the country’s democracy. Russia was linked, also, to the dozens of bomb threats that disrupted voting in swing states in the recent U.S. election.
With an unregulated internet that crosses borders, there are few solutions for preventing such democratic meddling in the future. This is just one of several ways that the internet and social media have impacted politics.
Here is another …
Social media has fractured politics by amplifying the extremes
A study of 8,000 Americans not long ago found the country was largely divided into seven groups of voters who shared similar political beliefs. The most liberal Americans made up 8 percent of the population, and the most conservative comprised 6 percent. But this slice of 14 percent of the electorate were the most prolific users of social media, the loudest voices, and the drivers of political discourse in both parties.
Jonathan Haidt wrote recently in The Atlantic about how a social media landscape dominated by these extremes has impacted politics.
These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. [my emphasis] What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This … is likely a result of thought-policing on social media … [which] makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.
This has influenced both parties in unfortunate ways.
1. Conservatives …
The “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors …
The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives … The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.
2. Liberals …
The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture … And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled …
When the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders … The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter … The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
Haidt concludes that, while there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, the challenges posed by the internet and social media could at some point result in a crisis for democracy.
We can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age … And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.
The challenge for democracies going forward
There are other challenging issues, as well, such as the case now before the Supreme Court over whether the government has the right to force TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese company or face a U.S. ban, which pits issues of freedom of speech versus national security and divides politicians of both parties.
But the reality is that social media isn’t going away, which means all of these difficulties are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. So an out of the box way of looking at this is to ask not how we can rid ourselves of the problem — which is unrealistic bordering on impossible — but instead whether there are other ways to overcome these obstacles, or at least to moderate the dysfunction that may be unnaturally pushing voters to the extremes.
One suggestion by Haidt is to try tamping down extremism through democratic reforms, such as open primaries, ranked choice voting, and the nonpartisan drawing of electoral districts. These solutions would in theory disincentivize party members on both sides of the aisle from running to the extremes, which in turn could perhaps mitigate some of the more damaging effects of social media.
There may also be ways to reform social media that don’t involve monitoring speech, and which therefore wouldn’t run into First Amendment issues. For instance, if social media companies did a better job of verifying users, or if they made it a bit more challenging to share content, such reforms could make it more difficult for extremist views or foreign actors to gain a foothold.
The truth is there is no simple and easy way to solve any of these challenges. But the questions do need to be grappled with because this is something that every democracy on the planet will have to face going forward.
Photos: Both images via Shutterstock.