Elections, social networks and the new theater of the Cold War
Make no mistake: even in the most mature democracies, elections and electoral campaigns have always had a strong element of theater about them. Candidates shaking hands, making selfies and kissing children while they promise things that, in many cases, they know they will never be able to deliver, addressing the faithful at rallies and bombarding them with catchy slogans. Critical thinking and deep reflection are not to be found during election campaigns.
Similarly, for years now, it has become the norm for all kinds of interests to interfere with campaigns, providing funding and resources for candidates on a quid pro quo basis. These contributions have traditionally come from business lobbies, pressure groups or others, among which there have been, on numerous occasions, foreign countries. Providing money to a candidate from a certain country hoping to get a better deal in bilateral relations, better trade agreements and other types of perks is nothing new.
But until now, such foreign interests were in the form of money that the beneficiaries could use as they saw fit, and were regulated more or less transparently by the legislation regulating the financing of political parties. Direct interference in election campaigns is newer, and as the investigation by US special prosecutor Robert Mueller Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election shows, anything goes.
It now turns out that Jenna Abrams, a prominent pro-Trump figure in the so-called American alt-right, with more than 80,000 followers and widely covered by the media, is a fictitious character created by a Russian troll farm based in St. Petersburg. This is just one of dozens of accounts of alleged activists of various factions designed to exploit and radicalize American society during the campaign, spouting ideas that in many cases, such as racism, that had long been off the debate. The large number of ads financed by Russia, which reached millions of Americans through careful targeting strategies on social networks such as Facebook or Google, were just the tip of the iceberg in a scenario where they were cleverly combined with all kinds of accounts of non-existent pundits, commentators and supposed ordinary Americans with messages and radical arguments millions of people swallowed. A strategy to which, quite possibly, Google, Twitter and Facebook themselves contributed through so-called embeds, assigned by the tech companies to the Donald Trump campaign team (but cordially rejected by Hillary’s team) who apparently played a very active role in defining his message.
Russia, country where democracy is a joke, has managed to turn the democracy of its enemy, the United States, into a joke at a time when most of us thought the Cold War had ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The growth of social networks has a new theater of operations that one of the most megalomaniac politicians in the world, Vladimir Putin, has learned to exploit to the full. Responding to these kinds of attacks is not easy: during the final months of the Obama presidency saw a range of diplomatic sanctions against Moscow, but at a time when nobody had any idea of the scale of Russian interference, and it’s still not clear how best to address the problem, given the fluid nature of the social networks.
Anybody who thinks Russian interference in the US elections was anecdotal or irrelevant, should think again. The US is, undoubtedly, the country that has been more active in meddling with other foreign nations, financing everything from activism, political parties and revolts to coup d’états as they saw fit, but this time, we are talking about an entirely new game. We are, possibly, facing the biggest challenge to democracy in history, with a drift towards populism fueled by social networks capable of altering the results of elections in supposedly mature and consolidated democracies. A problem much greater than it originally seemed, and whose consequences have already gone too far.
(En español, aquí)
