The future of democracies is here. I speak not of constitutional reform or bold new initiatives in drawing out the vote, but of the way a ‘coup d’état’ may take place in a democracy. Social media is playing a central role in this evolving future. It is not merely the primary instrument for the spread of information, misinformation and disinformation, it has become integral to what people think, how they affiliate with the like-minded, and how they organize themselves to persuade others or subvert systems.
Arguably, social media has been around since the invention of the electrical telegraph by painter and inventor Samuel Morse. The modern-day internet-based revolution started with applications like Six Degrees and LiveJournal in the late 1990s and Myspace in the early 2000s. Social media got a real boost about a decade later when people took first to Myspace and then to Facebook, You Tube and Twitter. The global numbers of people using social media rose from about 500 million in 2008 to 1 billion in 2010, 2 billion in 2015 and an estimated 3.8 billion today. Facebook, You Tube, WhatsApp, Instagram and WeChat together account for the largest number of users today. Social media users are growing globally at an annual rate of about 10%. The global average time spent on social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes per day; if someone signed up at age 16 and lived to age 80, s/he would have spent nearly 7 years of their life on it.
Populist politicians around the world recognized this trend early and began exploiting it by forging direct links with the people, disintermediating (and discrediting) traditional media in the process. Globally, Barak Obama, with 128 million followers, and Narendra Modi, with 78 million, lead the Twitter pack. Before his account was suspended on 8 January 2021, US President Donald Trump had 88 million followers. Facebook and Twitter suspended (and then permanently removed) Trump’s handle after the violent events that took place at the US Capitol building on 6 January when the presidential votes were being certified for President-elect Joe Biden. For weeks before that, far-right groups in the US had been using the power of social media to organize a march on state capitols and the US Capitol. On a wet day in May last year, they tried a dry and violent run, branded “judgment day”, on the Michigan State Capitol .
The surreal and violent actions that took place at the US Capitol and the largely peaceful but widespread protests that took place in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement offer a glimpse into the future of democracies. While large, heterogenous democracies are best governed from the centre of the political spectrum, they will become increasingly susceptible to pressure from the extremes—right and left. In statistical terms, the tail will have an inordinate ability to exert its influence. On the positive side, this allows for an unadulterated inclusion of otherwise silent voices. But on the negative side, it can distort messages, disrupt progress, and incite as well as abet violent protests. If a government that represents an extreme happens to be in power, the social media-aided monster could grow a hydra head and a poisonous tail. On 6 January, that appears to be what happened at the US Capitol.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law-enforcement officials had been following the relevant social media threads as fervour built up. The complete lack of preparedness and initial empathy shown towards protesters by some members of the police on 6 January will have to be part of the follow-up investigations into the incident.
As a consequence, far-right groups have been forced to leave the public social media domain. Immediately following Trump’s ban, they flocked to another platform called Parler, until Parler itself was booted out of Amazon web services.
These groups have now relocated to micro-blogging sites that are encrypted end-to-end, like Signal and Telegram, making it difficult for the FBI to track them. Happening as it did at the same time as a change in privacy rules by WhatsApp, Signal crossed 50 million downloads in a week on Google’s Play Store.
India ranks second by number of users of English language-based social media. And yet, the Indian context is completely different from that of the US in most respects. Even though India’s economy is rapidly growing, smartphones are not everywhere yet, and literacy, language and variety impose limits on the impact of social media. However, the power of these platforms to influence people in viral and non-linear ways—and in so doing change the course of events—remains a major threat to the robustness of our democracy.
In the US, the strength of institutions—particularly its courts, traditional media and state election architecture—helped surmount the attempted coup earlier this month. However, in the ‘appointocracy’ that characterizes our institutions, we may not be able to rely on them as bulwarks. Social media companies have changed their stance from laissez faire to greater interventionism after these events in the US, but that simply amounts to a ping-pong of power from the government to companies. As users go encrypted and underground, democracies should wake up to the problem and societies should evolve solutions that blunt this extraordinary and ungoverned power.
P.S.: To paraphrase Karl Marx, social media is the opium of the masses and beware of populists who dispense that opium.
Narayan Ramachandran is chairman, InKlude Labs. Read Narayan’s Mint columns at www.livemint.com/avisiblehand
