Good or bad for democracy?

Is digital technology good or bad for democracy? What the age of the internet has shown us is that we often want to get a straightforward answer to a question about some new technology or some new social phenomenon.

But democracy is a complicated set of institutions, values and principles and most complicated phenomena are good and bad for democracy at the same time. I think that’s definitely true of digital technology.

It would be a mistake to assume that it’s all bad. In some respects, digital technology, social networks and social media have been a wonderful enhancement of democracy because a core democratic principle is that everybody should have a voice. In non-democratic systems, authoritarian systems, individual voice is stifled and you have to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of power or connection to be heard. In a democracy, the ideal is that you can be heard whoever you are. By getting rid of many of the barriers in the way of ordinary people having a voice, this technology has allowed much more access not just to information but to platforms from which people can communicate. And that is a plus for democracy.

But something can be good for democracy and bad for democracy at the same time. We also see that this same technology, in the same moment when it’s giving everybody a voice, is also concentrating power and concentrating voice and authority in narrower and narrower spheres. The platforms on which people are able to communicate are owned by a very, very small number of people, almost all of them men, most of them American, some of them Chinese, who are, relatively speaking, very unaccountable.

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The platform that Mark Zuckerberg created, Facebook, gives many ordinary people real access to democratic forms of community. And at the same time, that platform is owned by one person, effectively, who makes the rules and is answerable to almost no one. And it’s the same platform.

So, the same thing can be both good for us and bad for us democratically.

Accessing information

More broadly, representative democracy was designed to correct for certain basic human impulses, including what you might call our cognitive biases. As human beings, we all have a tendency to misunderstand the world. We all focus too much on the present and on our own experiences. We have various biases in favour of things that we’re familiar with. We have biases in favour of the kinds of people that we know, and none of us is particularly good at imaginatively understanding how very different lives are lived. Representative democracy was designed to correct for some of that. This corrective feature slows politics down in some ways. There are delays between decisions and elections – it’s not necessarily immediate; people’s views are pooled and qualified in parliaments and in other forms of debate, through mass media.

When we access information through newspapers, that information is often slow – it can even be out of date – but these things help us moderate our tendency to think too quickly and to rush to judgement. Digital technology works exactly the other way. Digital technology, particularly through the form of these giant social networks, works with our cognitive biases. It encourages us to think quickly. It encourages forms of communication that are direct and are unmediated so that if we feel something, if we’re angry, if we’re upset, we have a means of passing our anger on straight away. That really does cut against what representative democracy was meant to do for us, which was to allow us, collectively, to reach judgements on big political questions that were not impulsive. Democracy in the age of social media is increasingly driven by immediate impulses because that’s the business model of the platforms on which this democracy is happening.

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Fake news is nothing new

Fake news is nothing new. As a historian of democracy, I see that in elections and democratic politics from 50 years ago or 100 years ago, you can find a lot of fake news. Traditional media were not necessarily that much more reliable than new forms of media. The difference is that 50 years ago, the fake information had to find you. People were probably limited to one or two TV channels or a few radio stations, their local newspaper or a national newspaper. Now, you can find the news that you want. If you have a view, you can probably find a new source that reinforces that view. And what makes a huge difference is the reinforcing effect going on; not that we invented fake news 10 years ago – fake news has always been around – but we invented means for people to find it for themselves straight away.

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I don’t think traditional media has gone away, but we are seeing in all aspects of the media landscape concentrations of power and influence. Smaller newspapers are disappearing, but the bigger newspapers are surviving. The New York Times in the United States is more powerful, more successful than it’s ever been. The Washington Post is surviving because it now belongs to Jeff Bezos. Concentrations of power, whether old or new, are always a threat to democracy, partly because you don’t get as much diversity of information. And then people start to suspect and mistrust traditional media because they believe that the most powerful players are pushing one particular line of thought. When you have a lot of newspapers with a lot of different political views, that’s one thing. When you have a super powerful paper that has seen the others out of business, that makes people much, much more suspicious.

There are still powerful forms of old media and fake news is not new. But technology allows people to find the news that they want while traditional democracy pushed against our cognitive biases, forcing us occasionally to hear news that we didn’t like. And if we don’t ever have to hear news that we don’t like, then democracy at some point will stop working.

The hidden face of social networks

The social media industry is basic; its business model is advertising. Social networks like Facebook are designed to sell us stuff fast, impulsively and relentlessly. Impulsive, relentless politics can be bad for democracy. It’s too quick. It’s too impulsive. It’s not reflective. It cuts against the ways in which we’ve built institutions that are designed to moderate our impulses.

However, our immediate experience of digital technology is our interface with these platforms, and many of our experiences are positive. We all know it’s good and bad: it’s frustrating, addictive, relentless. A lot of it is superficial and trivial, but it’s also amazing. As an academic, a teacher, I have access to information, to books, to ideas that I couldn’t get before. I have immediate access to those ideas. I don’t have to wait. I can find things out. I can follow a line of thought to unexpected places. I can communicate with people anywhere in the world. That’s the immediate experience of the interface.

But a lot of what’s going on is hidden from us. The surveillance is hidden from us: we’re aware of it, but we don’t see it. We see the adverts popping up, but we don’t really have a good idea of who’s watching us and how the ownership is hidden from us. We experience Facebook or Amazon, but we don’t really, in experiencing it, recognise the ways in which the power of these corporations is so narrow, so huge, so unaccountable.

Photo by Igor Stevanovic

But the thing that scares me most about this technology is not just the fact that it’s hidden from us but that I’m not sure anyone understands its full political implications, including the people who own it.

Managing digital platforms

At the moment we’re seeing three different models of how these technology platforms might be managed.

In the Chinese model, there are hugely powerful technology corporations, such as Baidu and Alibaba, that are often founded by individuals, like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. But the Chinese model is that the state controls most of what these corporations do, and the corporations and the state are very closely connected. There are connections between people, but there are also connections between the power structures, and no corporation is allowed to fire outside of the remit of the state. And you need a very powerful and very authoritarian state to do that.

For the West to adopt the Chinese model, to integrate Facebook and Amazon into the state, it’s not just a question of nationalising them in some old-fashioned socialist model. You need a state with comparable power to the Chinese state. But we don’t have those states and we don’t have a political party like the Communist Party of China, which infiltrates all aspects of Chinese society. If you want that model, there’s a very heavy price to pay.

At the other extreme, there’s the American model, which thinks that the market can regulate these giant corporations. Their belief is that though they look like monopolies, in the end, they’re not monopolies because competition will see a limit to their power. They’d say it might look like Facebook or Amazon or Google are all-powerful, but in 5 years, 10 years, they will be as vulnerable as big corporations were to them. IBM had power; it has less power now. Facebook and Google have only been around for 15 years. In 15 years’ time, they may be gone. That argument is not really convincing because they are currently monopolies and they are the kind of monopolies that don’t just dominate one part of the economy: they dominate across the economy. If you think about what Amazon does, it’s not just a retailer. It owns the cloud, the infrastructure, the pipes and the networks themselves. Google doesn’t just own a search engine. Google owns many of the platforms and devices we use in all aspects of our lives. Also, these corporations buy up their competitors when they are threatened: Facebook bought Instagram. It’s not at all clear to me that the market will break up these monopolies.

The European Union is probably the institution in the world at the moment that most seriously takes the regulation of big technology companies, including the big American technology companies, giving people a right to privacy, rejecting monopolies over information and retail. But the European Union is not a state, rather it is basically a legal, bureaucratic entity. While it has power, the power of law, it doesn’t have an army. It has a currency, but the euro is subject to the whims of national governments. It is weak.

The irony for me is that the democratic institution that’s taking the regulation of these corporations most seriously, the European Union, is the weakest. The strongest, the Chinese state, is the least democratic and the one that probably could do something. The American state is the one that currently is doing least. But America is a democracy and elections can make a difference. A democratic president of the United States elected on a platform to use law, and the power of the state to break up big technology companies might just do it even if the biggest lobbyists in Washington today are Google, Facebook and Amazon.

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Discover more about

digital democracy

Runciman D. (2016). Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. Journal of Political Philosophy.

Runciman D. (2015). Digital politics: Why progressives need to shape rather than merely exploit the digital economy. Juncture.

Runciman D. (2020). Talking Politics, the podcast.

Runciman D. (2021). Confronting Leviathan, A History of Ideas, Profile Books.