Social networks as weapons of disinformation and mass destruction
By Cayetano Solana (former student esi-uclm)
I have to confess, before getting into the matter, that I am an active user of both Twitter, for pleasure, as of Facebook, for necessity. I also use Instagram sporadically and tried TikTok y Twitch, but it seemed to me that I was disrespectfully invading another generation's place in the world. I come, therefore, stained with sin, and that I do not even declare what WhatsApp y YouTube because they compute as venial sin.
We live, worth the truism, in the era of instant information and uninterrupted communication. In fact, a significant portion of our lives is spent interacting with multimedia devices that blaze us with news and consequently shape our view of the world. According to recent studies, in 2021 every Spaniard used their mobile phone for almost five hours a day, time that increases from year to year.
This breeding ground, based on the axiom that information is power, is the wet dream of any autocracy: never in history have there been so many communication and information manipulation tools at hand to impose a "social will" (where it says "tools" perhaps it should put "weapons").
In other times of war, the planes had to launch propaganda sheets to raise the spirits of the civilian population and harangue the troops; today disinformation is transmitted faster, cheaper and more efficiently through social networks. Moreover, it has been shown that all incendiary and polarizing content attracts more strongly and spreads more easily because it brings out base instincts. If you want to go viral, and you don't know how to dance gracefully, you have to sell controversy, outrage and even hate.
This pessimistic perspective is already perceived as a dangerous reality around us. Putin He shows us this through his sick obsession with censorship, with the annihilation of wayward journalists and with the spread of a distorted perspective of reality. Let us remember that in Russia it is forbidden to define as “war” the conflict with Ukraine and one must speak of a "special military operation" under threat of eight years in prison. Putin, as an exemplary autocrat, is aware of the relevance of information manipulation to achieve his political and military goals and impose his will. We could analyze in depth other closer examples, but no.
In this regard, on April 21, the former president Barack Obama delivered an excellent lecture at the Stanford University which he titled "Disinformation is a threat to our democracy"). It is paradoxical that it is precisely Obama who warned about the risks of social networks when he forged his electoral victories thanks to them. Apart from the nice irony, the concern of the former president seems well founded: "social networks are well designed to destroy democracies; our new information ecosystem is accelerating some of humanity's worst drives.".
In our daily lives we may not be aware of the fragility of our historical context and its two great pillars, democracy and freedom, as if we took them for granted without paying attention to the verifiable threats. Obama remembers that “democracies have become dangerously complacent, but recent events remind us that democracy is neither inevitable nor automatic, and reforms must be introduced if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive”.
Obama confirmed that it is not necessary for people to believe hoaxes to weaken a democracy, an institution or a government; simply it is about flooding the public square with raw sewage, spreading dirt, asking questions, planning conspiracy theories, until the citizens don't know what to believe.
The volatility of the truth automatically derives from the informational chaos: reality ceases to make sense and, then, what is relevant is the struggle to impose your version of the facts. We see it every day in political communication and we remember Groucho: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" And that's where it comes into play. confirmation bias to reinforce one's beliefs: the Internet is too big for you not to find someone who says what you want to hear. Follow Obama: “Within our bubbles of personal information, our assumptions and our blind spots, our biases are not challenged but reinforced. Naturally, they are likely to react negatively to different opinions, which deepens racial, religious and cultural divisions”.
Special mention deserves the noble face of social networks as channels of activism to make injustices visible, stir up mobilizations or register dissidence. They allow us to live up to the minute what happens in every corner of the world without intermediaries. And, to combat it at a political level, there is only room for censorship and closure of networks that practice countries with questioned democracy such as China or Russia. It is precisely the intelligence arms of these types of nations that are obsessed with manipulating the algorithms of social networks to artificially spread misleading and harmful messages that aspire to weaken democracies and interfere in political elections around the world.
The evolution of artificial intelligence applied to deepfake technology it will return, in the near future, to more sophisticated disinformation. As Obama points out, he has seen himself on a screen saying things he has never said. Is it possible, then, to unravel reality if we can't even believe what we see? In this magma of suspicion, the rulers will feel like a fish in water to carry out their missions knowing that the confusion will blur the truth.
In the competition between truth and falsehood, cooperation and conflict, the very design of social media seems to tip us in the wrong direction. Obama blames it, without hot buttons, on the commercial interests of the companies that manage social networks and makes a call for responsible technology transformation from the spirit of innovation Silicon Valley: “These are not problems inherent to new technologies, nor are they inevitable, but the result of specific decisions made by the companies themselves that try to dominate the network in general: the platforms are designed with wrong incentives that end up feeding the worst impulses”. The American insists that, in order to sell more advertising, companies are collecting more and more data from users and analyzing their behavior, knowing that polarizing content awakens the lowest human instincts.
It is true that the capitals sins they already existed long before the first tweet, and the heavy burden of all the evils that afflict the democratic world on social networks should not fall on us, but it is also true that we must be ambitious and think that a favorable transformation of the algorithms that govern them can allow to placate divisions and rebuild trust and solidarity necessary to strengthen democracies.
The philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr proclaimed, during the fateful days of the war of Hitler, who “The human capacity to establish justice makes democracy possible, but the human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary”. In this dilemma, therefore, governments must cooperate to straighten the course of the algorithms that, with unsurpassed skill, generate economic returns and favor polarization. An algorithm does not question itself if it is fair, if it is ethical, or if it respects human rights, at most it may issue a certificate of legality. And yet, our coexistence in society depends on their learning and their "intelligence". It is rumored, for example, that Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is open to the possibility of releasing the code of the social network.
In this virtual scenario, new questions arise for future code developers about the ethics of algorithms and the commitment to put the rules of coexistence and democracy before chaos, misinformation and manipulated truth. Just as there are rigorous journalists and biased journalists, in the hands of those who write source code and design social networks lies the responsibility for our future freedom. Doesn't seem like much.
* * Cayetano Solana Ciprés is a Doctor in Computer Engineering from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, graduated from the Higher School of Computer Science and former member of the ORETO Research group. After extensive experience in private companies in the IT sector, he is currently Mayor of Villaescusa de Haro.
