How social media are increasingly coming under government control
Officially, social networks are spaces for people to share mutual interests, opinions, photographs, thoughts: a means for us to express ourselves, comment on events, upload a photo or write something without having to surmount the entry barriers posed by the traditional media. That inclusive approach, which means that theoretically anyone with internet access and a basic understanding of it could open an account and communicate with the world, explains the success of the social networks, an unprecedented phenomenon in the use of technology to spread the word.
That said, after a period of exponential growth that has attracted billions of people around the globe, comes a second phase, characterized by the use of governments to control the social networks. We now know, thanks to the investigations carried out by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, that Donald Trump’s assault on the White House was aided by Russia and that he showed Facebook how its very own tools could be used for electoral ends and is now its biggest advertiser.
In China, the social networks are under permanent government surveillance and have become a tool for social control at the service of the state: critics of the regime will find themselves harassed by pro-government trolls, blocked or removed from them and isolated from family and friends. Governments in Ecuador, the Philippines, India, Malta, Mexico, Turkey, Venezuela or Vietnam, to name just a few, have created armies of state-sponsored trolls to defend certain positions or to fight others.
In Uganda, a tax on social media has prompted widespread protest: the amount, around five cents a day, is a significant amount for many people in this impoverished East African nation, and equally importantly, imposes governmental control over the social networks that some people have tried to avoid by using VPNs that the authorities are now trying to ban.
Egypt’s military dictatorship has just passed a new law giving the state powers to close down social network accounts, blogs or pages with more than five thousand followers on the basis that they are effectively media outlets. They can also be fined if they print “fake” news or “spread alarm”. The very tools that played an important role in the Arab Spring are now being used by the authorities to prevent further social protest.
Governments around the world have realized the power of the social networks and are not only trying to control them, but are intensifying their efforts to use them for their own ends in ways that bypass any legal constraints. We face a new international order, a new geopolitics where governments with unlimited powers are able to add the social networks to their other means of crushing dissent: social networks at the service of populist politics.
(En español, aquí)
