Is the Internet to blame for resurrecting authoritarianism?

Over the past few years, the potentially harmful impact of the internet, and especially of social media on democracy, has increasingly dominated the news. An e-mail stemming from Facebook company recently found that workers allowed partner companies to collect users' data for a certain fee are most recent in a long line of scandals around social media platforms.

Facebook, also accused along with Twitter, of promoting spreading false information. In October, the Brazilian newspaper “Folha” testified that Jaiir Bolsonaro's candidacy benefited from a co-ordinated dezinformation campaign carried out via the Facebook-owned clocksapp.

And there are growing concerns that this tactic could be used to distort the parliamentary elections in India in April of next year. In view of these alarming findings, it is easy not to put aside the ways the internet itself plays a role in strengthening democracy.

This allows citizens to mobilise in authoritarian states as much as in stable democracy. By eliminating physical space, and providing access to many people in global communication, it is especially effective in allowing groups to share their stories, explore their identities, and discover unpleasant truths about the dynamics of power.

Through the network, disadvantaged groups have been able to overcome the media filter, presenting their condition as a collection of isolated cases, and revealing the systematic nature of discrimination they faced. Granted, there is considerable disagreement about net balance, breadth and fundamental processes, which foster the impact of the Internet on society.

But I've identified 3 competing groupings:” netizens”, “narists” and “arkitextists”. Negationists deny that the internet is responsible for the problems we see in the world today. They believe the internet is as neutral as a mirror. And if people don't like what the internet is producing, they have to throw it away anymore.

eyes on the huge inequality common in their societies.

They say that in a online world where people can easily co-ordinate, tolerance of injustice is smaller, and our unjust societies are no longer sustainable. Just as the popular press has contributed to the decline of feadadalism, so today's information highway is simply making injustice more evident.

The Internet allows people to get together and fight injustice. In short, their message is that we have to fix injustice, not the internet. This camp includes many media analysts covering Arab Spring. In the meantime, narrators claim that social co-operation requires a common concern and that the internet has thousands of voices in a chaotic way undermines that goal.

They stress that micro-targetting political advertising allows political candidates to spread different messages, and often contradictory, to different people. Narraters also stress that the major co-ordination enabled by the internet has damaged traditional power agents, such as political parties and trade unions, and has fed thousands of small interest groups. Once, they argue, traditional power agents would work on creating a platform that could constantly organise a host of ideas and demands.

Today, the internet is promoting a chaotic system of political issues, where leaders can promise to care for a wide range of interest groups without explaining how each promise adapts within a broader framework of thought. This camp includes many of the traditional media, which rely on arguments presented by experts from top universities in Britain and the United States.

Architecturalists, meanwhile, claim that the internet is not a fixed structure, and that what is causing today's anxieties can be traced to relatively recent developments in internet architecture. They argue that the original design of the Internet created incentives for people to pay attention to the quality of content they create and share.

At its beginning, the internet had no keepers and an open market of ideas that organically tried to promote good over bad content. Rather, the model of advertising - based income followed by many modern technology giants promotes commitment to content that is sensational, but not necessarily of good quality.

Who's right? Each of the three camps is right at one point. A small part of private companies check the information needed to understand how the online ecosystem works. They manage the main infrastructure, and most experts in this area are running this infrastructure after signing an agreement to avoid detection.

Plato's allegory with the Cave can thus be a more appropriate metaphor. Control of key data allows these companies to play master-hyde. They have the chance to discover only parts of reality, which they find appropriate, determining how the vast public perceives space on the Internet.

The reduction of information is not just a natural consequence of Internet innovation. It was artificially created, and for strategic purposes: to shape public opinion. Should we discipline these large companies? Or should we not do anything? Whatever we do, it must be the result of a powerful public debate.

A debate that is based on the best available evidence, regarding the effects the internet has on power relations. At this point, we need key information to be discovered, and to be available for public consideration. But information is power and is unlikely to be revealed voluntarily. This may require legal adjustment.

What we have is a growing gap between the country where power extends, and the one where institutions seeking to take responsibility for people. Such institutions are unable to ensure democraticly elected leaders can fulfill their campaign promises.

This is what causes social tensions, and undermines belief in our democracies. We need our institutions, to interpret these tensions as “red flags”, and as a call for the need of a new social contract. And we need institutions to react now.

This situation goes far from arguing about digitalization. However, Internet space is our future, so this gap is the most visible and urgent. If our current government institutions fail to ensure that the ongoing technological revolution puts people first, these institutions will eventually become irrelevant.

Taken by cuts from Open Democrace.net / World.al