Protecting democracy from manipulation
Facebook says it has removed a network of pages, groups and accounts involved in what it calls “coordinated unauthentic behavior,” schemes operating out of Iran and Russia identified by security company FireEye aimed at influencing public opinion and to “mislead others about who they were and what they were doing.”
Drawing on the same investigation, Twitter and YouTube have since said they are removing accounts and channels involved in the scheme, which is targeting several hundred thousand people in the run up to the US mid-term elections.
Europe looks at these processes and the American naïveté with a mix of skepticism and concern: Iran and Russia are known to have interfered in a number of political processes, among them the Brexit referendum, as well as in elections in former Soviet republics. The idea is to polarize public opinion using all kinds of topics, from vaccines to immigration: anything goes in the bid to manipulate large pockets of undecided or dormant voters into believing that their participation is essential to avoid some kind of terrible threat.
The tech companies, now thrust into the role of guardians of democracy, are meeting to share experiences and evaluate joint strategies. I first commented on this in the wake of the US presidential election and the unexpected victory of Donald Trump, who may now be (hopefully) facing jail time, and the pattern is now clear: governments in countries with no democratic tradition have set up online armies armed with thousands of accounts, groups and pages camouflaged as groups in the countries whose electoral processes they are trying to destabilize or manipulate. Whether to elect a president with no respect for democracy, to simulate huge support in a divisive referendum or to provoke an unexpected decision: anything goes in the campaign to question democracy not from the point of view of universal suffrage but to peddle views held by a tiny, dangerous minority and that the social networks have made it possible to spread.
When I and others first started talking about this, many dismissed the idea that it was possible to influence elections, and that we were simply trying to find other explanations for perfectly natural outcomes. But we now know that elections been manipulated using psychology and an understanding of new social networks that have allowed for unprecedented micro-targeting. We face a very real attack on our democracy, orchestrated by authoritarian regimes. Regarding the US mid-terms, some are already saying the damage is done and that it is too late, but it may not be so. This interference will continue in elections or referendums in the democracies in the coming months, at least until the social networks have been able to develop procedures to identify, neutralize or simply make life more difficult for those trying to manipulate public opinion. Democracy may not be perfect, but it is certainly not as bad as some people out there are trying to make out.
It’s them versus us: autocrats and theocrats versus the democrats. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
(En español, aquí)
