How to stop the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’ from warping democracy

Credit: CNAS

Every new communication technology brings a range of constructive and destructive effects, and over time, ways are found to improve the balance, note analysts Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell. If we want democracy to succeed—indeed, if we want the idea of democracy to regain respect in an age when dissatisfaction with democracies is rising—we’ll need to understand the many ways in which social-media platforms create conditions that may be hostile to democracy’s success, they write for The Atlantic Monthly, suggesting three types of reform:

(1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. If social media creates incentives for moral grandstanding rather than authentic communication, then we should look for ways to reduce those incentives. One such approach already being evaluated by some platforms is “demetrication,” the process of obscuring like and share counts so that individual pieces of content can be evaluated on their own merit, and so that social-media users are not subject to continual, public popularity contests.

(2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. Bad actors—trolls, foreign agents, and domestic provocateurs—benefit the most from the current system, where anyone can create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to manipulate millions of people. Social media would immediately become far less toxic, and democracies less hackable, if the major platforms required basic identity verification before anyone could open an account—or at least an account type that allowed the owner to reach large audiences……

RAND

(3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. Social media has become more toxic as friction has been removed. Adding some friction back in has been shown to improve the quality of content. For example, just after a user submits a comment, AI can identify text that’s similar to comments previously flagged as toxic and ask, “Are you sure you want to post this?” This extra step has been shown to help Instagram users rethink hurtful messages. ….

A pluralistic democratic society should make sure people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray, argues Sacha Baron-Cohen (above). If we do that maybe we have a chance of stopping the greatest propaganda machine in history, he writes for The Washington Post. 

At the same time, Twitter surfaced a recent study from academics in France, Canada and the United States, which examined the relationship between social-media echo chambers and support for populism in France, Britain and the United States, notes Ross Douthat. The authors found that there was either no relationship or a negative one: Populist voters were somewhat more likely to hang out with people of a similar ethnicity or social class offline, but on the internet they were no more likely than other voters to inhabit an echo chamber,

The assumption that a better social media ecosystem would help dilute illiberal voices leads to two mistakes, he writes for The Times:

• First, you end up downgrading the obvious real-world forces driving populism’s appeal, persuading yourself that an algorithmic tweak or better fact-checking will deal with deep trends — economic stagnation, social crisis — that would exist with or without fake news.
• Second, you lose sight of the ways in which your own information bubble is a potential radicalizing force — including for people observing it from outside, for whom it makes political liberalism seem like an airless world filled with hyper-educated ideologues….