10/24: Machine Politics

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[wanitchayap]

Thank you in advance for your presentation! I am specifically interested in your view of the social media and Democracy in your Harper’s article. I agree with your point that “[c]omputer-supported interconnection is simply no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the hard work of living together.” However, I am not sure if I can totally agree with your claim that "social media will never be able to do the difficult, embodied work of democracy.” You mentioned that even though movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo demonstrated that social media can be powerful, "the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws.” I am not knowledgable enough to critic on these movements, but I want to bring up similar movement occurred quite recently in Thailand. Less than a year ago, we had our first election after several years under the coup. Before this election, Thailand had gone through a long period of political instability, and that led to the give-up-on-Thai-politic attitudes of Thai people, especially those with ages under 30 or so. However, because of several movements on Thai Facebook protesting on the unfairness from the current Prime Minister’s, Prayut Chan-o-cha, modifications in the laws for his own advantages over the upcoming election, many young Thais changed their attitudes about their roles in Thai Democracy, and there were many more voters participated in that election than normal. I think that this is one of the examples where you can see that social media can, to a certain degree, embodies Democracy. Even though this example did not lead to "enforceable laws”, voting is still an explicit, and actually the foundational, part of Democracy.

[WMhYang]

Thank you very much for your presentation in advance. The readings vividly describe the formation of fascism in the 1930s and the development of authoritarianism in the social media era. The similarity between them really warns me against following messages on social medias without deep thinking. In your 2019 essay, you mention that we need to revitalize the legistation system and political process to realize the truths of our experience, and the reason why they were discarded was that they were bureaucratic and slow to change. I wonder if it is possible to make use of the technical progress to overcome the disadvantages of political process and legistation system when dealing with social media. For example, say we have created a system based on machine learning to figure out and verify the truths of our experience on social media so that the political process can be boosted. If so, how could we, or the public, manage and monitor the system? Could it be entrusted to private-owned companies?

[SoyBison]

Thank you for your contribution to our workshop! My question pertains to the issue of social reaction-ism in general. The call-to-arms at the end of this Harper's article asserts that the proper reaction to this issue is to throw out the system where social media is constructed in the way it has been. Is there any approach that you can think of which would be able to keep the positives of these structures while moving toward a solution?

[ydeng117]

Thank you for the presentation. Internet and social media provide a platform for people with heretical dangerous ideology to find each other and, therefore, lead to the rampant propagation of racism, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism. How would social media be able to spread universal value? Should there be a social institution to constantly educate people of righteousness?

[pdwaggoner]

Thanks for the great pieces and participation in the workshop. Fascinating ideas to consider.

I wonder how truly unique it is that social media acts as an outlet for reflecting preferences and liberating strands in society (e.g., "MeToo," cited in the paper). Yes the scope and reachability afforded by social media is new. But, as noted in the piece, a downside of such a social-media-dominated culture is the spread of already deeply entrenched divisions, at a global scale. Yet, the notion of topics and issues rising in popularity and then fading in the face of painfully slow bureaucratic and legislative responsiveness is not as new.

Consider Anthony Downs' issue attention cycle: issues rise in prominence and popularity at the mass level, yet die away relatively quickly once they are confronted by the slowness of policy responsiveness as well as the cost of policy action. Only the core group of initial, intense activists remains, and thus this issue typically falls off the public agenda.

And I would argue further that the system was designed (whether rightly or wrongly) to move slowly to prevent policy creation as a function of momentary/popular trends, whether the trends are substantial and valuable or not.

So while we should seek to turn preferences into legislation as the Harper's piece suggests, I wonder how realistic this is, as this has been an (often conflictual) issue at the center of American democracy since the founding.

[linghui-wu]

Thank you for your great presentation. It is indeed a really intriguing topic and I myself also have been pondering the topic for some time. The article on HARPERS provides me with a new perspective on why social media may fail to accomplish "difficult and embodied work for democracy". I do not believe that the widespread internet nowadays would tremendously broaden citizen's space in the discourse, either. From my experience, the internet on the rise, if not handled properly, easily becomes the tool that the authoritarian governors utilize to manipulate people and consequently, citizens live in the shadow of self-censorship, which we are obliged to be aware of.

[hihowme]

Thanks so much for the great pieces and presentation in advance! It's really amazing how you talked about the history and the relationship between the social media and authorization. It is particularly interesting if you consider the situation that social media is combined with internet and they are everywhere in our daily life. I have a question. In today's social media, it is kinda hard to attract people's attention, even if you are telling the truth -- because you have few followers. Also, if people do not know the truth or they just disagree with you, they will ignore your message and just reply rudely to you. What do you think of this situation and what do you think is the right way to tell the truth, to attract people's attention?

[policyglot]

I'd like to add to the insight from @pdwaggoner and apply it to a specific quote from your text:

Since the Second World War, critics have challenged the legitimacy of our civic institutions simply on the grounds that they were bureaucratic and slow to change. Yet organizations such as hospitals demonstrate the value of these features. They remind us that a democracy must do more than allow its citizens to speak. It must help them live.

So as @pdwaggoner and you both point out, perhaps slowness in political systems isn't necessarily a problem to be solved. If you turn to Evgeny Morozov's 'To Save Everything Click Here', he critiques Europe's 'Pirate' political parties on the same grounds. They operate largely online without bureaucracy and physical offices. So they claim to be reducing inefficiencies of collaboration and discussions. However, innovations like 'Liquid Feedback' notepads and upvotes for promising ideas are bedeviled by the same factors as seen in the real world: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/eugene-morozov-attacks-internet-consensus-single-handed/

I feel a bit conflicted saying this, but here goes: How would we build a case for 'slowness' in bureaucracies in this Digital Age, specifically as a means to separate Big Data noise from the signal, while still targeting corruption and inefficiencies that obstruct timely public service?

[pdwaggoner]

@policyglot great thoughts and response. Excellent case study from Morozov. I would offer a quick response/follow-up question to your concluding question: setting corruption to the side for a moment, I feel like this is a perceptual issue, as that which might be branded as slow by some (the "good" version for our purposes), might be branded as inefficient by others (the "bad" version for our purposes).

The condition of branding, at least in policymaking, is most-often rooted in preferences, where those who prefer a policy action might suggest that the process is slow to ensure the most effective, transparent policy work is being done, whereas opponents of the same policy action might suggest that this is just another example of government inefficiency, and a waste of tax dollars (borrowing from mainstream political rhetoric, but hopefully the idea is clear enough). Regardless of preferences in this case, both sides are describing the same quantity of interest, just from distinct perspectives.

Thus, isn't inefficiency the same thing as slowness in public policymaking, which ultimately guards against knee-jerk policy formation, especially in the digital age? Just some food for thought, but a fascinating heuristic case here.

[liu431]

In the last paragraph of your Harpers paper, you suggest that:

all we need to do to change the world is to voice our desires in the public forums they build

From an international student's view, I think it's tricky and a bit idealistic. For example, a Harvard student was deported as his friends expressed views that oppose the US on social media posts (link). There are other many similar cases in just recent months.

So the question is how should we build better public forums to ensure people are 'safe' to voice desires and opinions?

[chun-hu]

Not only did famous social movements, e.g. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, start on social media, political movements utilized the online platform as well. In the case of British Exit, people favoring an exit from the EU initiated a petition online immediately after the referendum vote, expressing their dissatisfaction with the result and calling for a second referendum. The petition soon attracted more than four million signatures and led to a debate in Parliament. Social media is a powerful force in the public sphere; however, my concern is that many people don’t actually think about the consequences of their action/speech online, and choose to “follow the crowd” in a largely automatic and unthinking fashion. In the case that these movements initiated on social media could actually influence our social behaviors and political decisions, who should be responsible for such influence if the result eventually turns against our will?

[nswxin]

Thank you for your presentation! Social media nowadays do provide us great platforms for giving our voices. However, just as you mentioned in the articles, there’s a risk of developing a new kind of authoritarian and even fascism, not to mention the cases of cyber-crime we already witnessed. Concerning all these drawbacks of the “free-speech” online, is it practical to introduce a series of regulations to prevent the abuse of social media? (Apparently, we need something that both provides a “clean” online environment and promotes democracy by ensuring the rights of free speech. ) If so, what will this type of regulation look like?

[ShuyanHuang]

Thank you for presenting. Inspired by your magazine article about how today's new form of authoritarianism arises from the performance of individualism on the internet, I am thinking how the recent rise of block-chain technology will change the current situation. Although people can express their individual voices to all, the network defined by social media is still somehow "centered", since people like Trump get a lot more attention than others. So what if we can have a network with no center. The core of block-chain is a common "book" shared by everyone and thus no one can make changes without being noticed by others. This technology enables a kind of currency without the existence of a center bank, and some argue this will change the way society works because we may be able to get rid of a center government someday.

[nwrim]

Thank you for providing us with a interesting read and a great presentation! On your Harper's article, you mention that

For all their sophistication, the algorithms that drive Facebook cannot prevent the recrudescence of the racism and sexism that plagued the communes. On the contrary, social-media platforms have helped bring them to life at a global scale. And now those systems are deeply entrenched.

As I have very limited knowledge on how social-media platform operate, and I am not clearly seeing how social-media platform helped in "the recrudescence of the racism and sexism". Are there any general mechanisms or algorithms which the companies use that reinforce this kind of behavior?

You did mention one problem of the social-media companies in the same article that, quoting professor Tim Wu,

social-media companies are enabling a new form of censorship by allowing human and robotic users to flood the inboxes of their enemies in an effort to keep them quiet

suggesting that social-media companies are not successfully regulating the "new form of censorship". However, the role of social-media in this kind of problem seems quite passive to me, since it just means that they were not very successful at damage control. I am curious if there are certain cases where social-media companies actively encouraged the emergence of "today's authoritarians". (to gain more profit, for example) Thank you again for the interesting read - it was a great food for thought to me.

[timqzhang]

Thank you for your presentation. It is impressing to see the idea that the digital world is breeding a new form of authoritarianism, as we are all participants of this digital era. Here are my following two questions.

1. In your last section of the articles, you seem to point out there doesn't exist an effective bridge between social media and the actual legislation, which means that voices from social media cannot quickly take effect, as mentioned a "challenge" at end. However, considering your worries towards the authoritarian rise on Internet, do you think it is actually doing good to prevent such authoritarian trend from being quickly turned into laws, by cutting such a bridge between social media and legislation? Law enforcement should be cautious to proceed.

2. What role should social media company play in this issue? Basically they are just platforms which should only stand on neutral positions, and it is the users on that social media who lead certain trend, whether authoritarian or not. Therefore, to what degree do you think the social media companies should reform in turns of regulation or "new form of censorship"? Personally I expect such reform should not come so radical.

[vinsonyz]

Thank you for your sharing! You mentioned that the social media can be a platform for express the political opinions. But let's say if a public celebrity express his political opinion on twitter, does this opinion only represent himself or herself, or the the group of interests that he or she represents?

[rkcatipon]

Jumping off of @nwrim's response, I'd too would like to better understand the mechanisms in which, "...social-media platforms have helped bring [racism and sexism] to life at a global scale." I agree that social media has amplified the voices of alt-right groups, but I disagree that social media movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo may fail if not enshrined in policy:

The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force for liberating us from the fiction that all is well just as it is. But the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. Even though the American state can be inefficient, unfair, corrupt, and discriminatory, the logic of representation that underlies it remains the most effective engine we have for ensuring the equable distribution of our collective wealth.

My belief is that alt-right's hate speech is given visibility because it is legitimized by the power structures that privilege their "free speech" over the personal safety of others. They are protected by policy. If social media movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo fail, it will not only be because of policy, but rather by a failure by individuals to recognize these movements as legitimate. We often posit alt-right attitudes as being the binary opposite of these social media movements, but this is a false dichotomy and one that must be addressed, first in media coverage and then in conversations at large.

[tianyueniu]

Thank you for the inspiring articles! You mentioned in the Harper essay that: "For all their sophistication, the algorithms that drive Facebook cannot prevent the recrudescence of the racism and sexism that plagued the communes. On the contrary, social-media platforms have helped bring them to life at a global scale." To add on to that, I think an interesting thing is that Facebook is trying to 'prevent' untruthfulness/biases from plaguing the social media by pulling down specific posts from the social media, and the decision to pull off A instead of B is entirely made by Facebook. Can this be considered as a form of authoritarian 'censoring' as well? If so, what kinds of political legislations should be put in place to best promote equality & fairness on the social media?

[bjcliang-uchi]

Thank you for the presentation.

I hope to start with a basic question: what do you mean by "mass"? Intuitively it is used to refer to the emotion-driven "ordinary" people with limited capability to think critically, and those with what Arendt describes as the "banality of evil." That being said, the word "mass" implies that there exists a class of prudent experts and elites. But do you think there is anything more than mass in today's world, especially when DC itself seems to be so emotional now?

Building on this point, what do you think is the role of identity politics in shaping the "mass culture," or how it interacts with the "General Semantics," especially when words like "abortion" have become nowadays "Nazi,"--something that triggers emotion much faster than reasoning?

Also, as a student studying computational social science, I am wondering how algorithms can help facilitate reasoning rather than simply amplifying current political polarization. I am asking this because recent news about Facebook and other tech companies show that, algorithms are actually capturing human beings' stereotypes and collective patterns and pushing them even further.

[lulululugagaga]

Thank you for this brilliant sharing that goes through the whole machine politics picture of the past few decades.

My question is that at the end of the last two paragraphs you mentioned,

"those who would claim power in the public sphere today must speak in a deeply personal idiom. They must display the authentic individuality that members of the Committee for National Morale once thought could be the only bulwark against totalitarianism, abroad and at home."

But how do these people speak their idiom when the public sphere today highly relies on social media but the platforms themselves fail to serve for democracy? Which channel may be effective as we expect it to be and how can we measure?

Thanks.

[romanticmonkey]

Thank you so much for sharing at this workshop. I am very impressed by your approach which draws from accessible history valuable lessons we might need for the current political turmoil, and I am very interested in your opinions on the following questions:

1) I am curious about your opinion on religion's influence on politics. As commonly conceived, many alt-right groups promote Pro-life and anti-homosexuality ideas. To what extent, do you think religious values play into the political situation we are facing right now?

2) As you mentioned in your (2019) article, through the online platform the neo-Fascists, anti-Semites of our age united as a political fort. However, one of the core concepts of democracy is free speech. How do you see the phenomenon that free speech comes with hate speech in the online environment now? Do you think there is a solution, an equilibrium to reach? Or do you think this issue is polemic in nature, that there exists no way to attain an ideal state of affairs?

3) My last question is a bit philosophical. As you mentioned, humans are constantly in the struggle for freedom. But the initially proposed pathway to freedom again and again transformed into authoritarian tools. Do you think that we may one day achieve ideal freedom? Or do you think this is an inevitable struggle that's essential to our existence?

[anuraag94]

Thanks in advance for your presentation.

In the battle for democracy, there are two distinct forces at play. Internally, there is the new authoritarianism, which you identify has its roots in our collective faith in engineering as a form of governance. Externally, there is the adversarial threat -- enemy agents who seek to undermine the fragile institution of democracy, because our social media connectedness reduces its cost below even modern forms of warfare like software hacks to critical infrastructure. These agents use a perception problem to undermine our shared view of reality, which Renee Diresta highlights in her essay The Digital Maginot Line.

DiResta examines a fundamental disconnect in the way that different users interact with digital platforms. Whereas the ordinary public views them as extension of physical space, "the new public square, with a bit of a pollution problem," combatants view them "as a Hobbesian information war of all against all," where the territory to be won is "the human mind." The public is incentivized to share on social media, which paints a rich picture of reality with granular data that might be used to strengthen the stalwart institutions of democracy. That sharing also creates a rich field for perception exploitation, which is used to undermine those very institutions.

Do you agree with my characterization? Which of these two forces are more significant? Do your suggested solutions to the authoritarianism problem also apply to the adversarial threat? If not, how should we structure policy to address both of them?

[Leahjl]

Thanks for the presentation! As you mentioned in the article, "The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force for liberating us from the fiction that all is well just as it is. But the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. " Is there any way for those movements on social media to promote the process of legislation?

[YuxinNg]

Thank you for the presentation. I would like to say I am totally agree with @wanitchayap 's opinion that "social media can, to a certain degree, embodies Democracy". I also would like to add one more example to that. Clearly, social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube played a very important role in Arab Spring. Actually, many scholars hold the belief that a college-educated street vendor’s (Mohamed Bouazizi’s) self-immolation which was widely spread on social media platforms was actually what triggered the Arab Spring. I tend not to judge whether Arab Spring is "good" or not. But as we can see in Arab Spring, social media definitely led to Democracy.

[YanjieZhou]

Thank you for your presentation. In an era of social media, I also feel strongly that the social media, which would have provided platforms for everyone to reveal and recognize themselves, are now evolving into a new kind of censorship and irrational homophily--groups of people with same beliefs tending to gather albeit without comprehensive knowledge of their common beliefs. Is it a irreversible trend or how can we grapple with this quandary through political changes?

[harryx113]

Thank you Prof. Turner for the great article and presentation. When I was reading your article and my peers' comments, I couldn't help but start thinking about the 'boundary of democracy'. Do you think that social media has expanded the boundary of democracy, granting people more freedom to share views online? Or has social media undermined people's independent and critical thinking through reinforcement?

[sunying2018]

Thanks for your presentation! I have similar concern with @liu431 especially for the international student. Recently, international students are required to submit their social media account in the process of F-1 visa application. In some cases, their voices or their connects' opinions will be reviewed and some of them were rejected because of this problem. I am wondering if is there any mechanism or method to protect the freedom to voice? Do we need to setup a "safe boundary" to support this freedom?

[yongfeilu]

Thank you for the presentation! Online social media are providing people with platforms to make their voices heard, but whether computer engineering can solve the societal conflicts or not is still a big problem. In this way, we still need a logic or an idea to sustain an operation system of this world. But computer-supported interconnections can be used to distribute certain ideas and make people believe in these ideas. Do we have some fundamental mechanisms in our society to prevent the distribution of evil ideas that lead to tragic events? Under what circumstances will such mechanisms not work? How can we improve on this?

[HaowenShang]

Really interesting topic! For the paper talking about the Machine Politics, it is said that social media may play a powerful role for liberating people, but the activists occurred on social media or internet will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. So, I’m wondering if there are some ways to combine government with social media or Internet to create powerful tools for liberation and democracy? And which kind of the social media activity is meaningful enough to be write in law? Thanks!

[bakerwho]

I resonated deeply with your phrasing in "the hard work of living together". Seeing how social media has far from solved interpersonal communication, I'm curious about the potential for the 'problem' here to self-repair.

Might certain more 'immersive' or 'empathy-inducing' online interactions be a good-enough way to share lived experiences, and trickling up, to secure self-expression? Or alternatively, do you think a preservation of non-digital interactions might be essential to having the kinds of communication structures for equity and harmony?

I really enjoyed browsing through your work, and thank you for the presentation.

[PAHADRIANUS]

I really appreciate your great insights on the dynamics between the rise of social media and the state of politics and look forward to your presentation tomorrow. As you have demonstrated in "Where Did All The Fascists Come From?", the rise of radio empowered propaganda of extremist ideas. Today, just like Napoleon's press as the seventh and Goebbels's radio as the eighth great power, internet and its associated social medias would become the ninth. From printed press to radio, and now to internet, every innovation made the acquisition of information more personalized. I think it is not process of personalization, rather the way such personlization is utilized, would determine the outcome: the printed press could foster individualization and progress such as the Reformation, but also was a weapon of counter-reforms and religious crackdowns; Hitler and Mussolini popularized their ideas through radio, so did Churchill and Roosevelt; and now so-called liberals and despots use the internet as combat grounds alike. It is concerning that a forum space meant for diversity and variation in ideas could end up speaking homogeneously, either for authoritarianism or blind populism. Should the government regulate the internet, this ninth great power greatly exceeding its predecessors, in the public interest, even at risk of being accused of censoring dissent? And if so, how can the regulation be done in a way to minimize the loss of speech diversity?

[KenChenCompEcon]

Thanks for the enlightening topic. This is a really interesting topic and the phenomena articulated in the book can undergo everywhere under flattened media networks. I feel so related to these issues. Mass communication can make the mass feel less isolated from being unhooked from the others but sometimes that might cause collective misbehavior. However, censorship over mass communication is oftentimes considered violent to freedom of speech. How can the governing entities reach a balance between the potential threats and these fundamental rights that people desire?

[ChivLiu]

Thank you for the presentation! From the article, we could understand the great influence of social media trends. The top trending issues are mostly about well-known social movements, and those physical protests have been mainly organized by using social media accounts nowadays. However, if we suppose the top trends were lead by the same group of people, they might become less representative since those would only reflect their opinions on politics. My question is that during the 21st century when government proficiency got much boosted, should the government only measure the importance of a social media trend by counting the population supporting it or by the president's idea?

[ZhouXing-19]

Very thought-provoking, thank you. I read the article Machine Politics : The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism and copied the following sentence on my notebook: If the communes of the 1960s teach us anything, they teach us that a community that replaces laws and institutions with a cacophony of individual voices courts bigotry and collapse. This reminds me of the Echo Chamber effect of social media, that is to say people's idea tend to be narrowed as we are exposed to ideas aligned with theirs and thus reinforce their belief. What's worse is that by such algorithm, we may be exposed to "partial truth" every day, which may lead to distorted mindset and automatically result in polarization. Cass R. Sunstein in his Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media provided an interesting solution, that is to import a "serendipity button" to deliver news or opinions opposed to users' "default preferences". By encouraging the mixture of different ideas, we may be possible to avoid being spoiled by the recommendation algorithm of facebook, buzzfeed, CNN or other media portals.

[zeyuxu1997]

Thanks for presenting. I have a question about developing countries. As we know, most of developing countries have a technical disadvantage compared with developed countries, besides, they may have less experience on defending against attack through online media, which makes them vulnerable to developed countries' propoganda. Considering the fact, do you think a policy that imposes restrictions on Internet is reasonable?

[ruixili]

Thank you for your presentation! In a digital world where social media posing threats to traditional media, swiftly adapts to the emerging ways of publishing ideas and makes maximum usage of the new technology is of great importance for either candidate campaign or political propaganda, especially for countries like China, where the broadcasting industry is supervised by the central government. With attributes like anonymous posting and real-time explosion, social media is a challenge for the regulatory department. This is also true for publicizing stage during the general election. So my question is, is there a way to tackle the challenge presented by emerging media?

[di-Tong]

Thank you for sharing your very interesting perspectives on the role of internet in the evolution of political regimes. I totally agree with your specific points that we could not rely on engineers to do our politics for us, and naively believe that ensuring platforms for individual expressions would definitely brings about or consolidate democracy. I have a couple of points and questions.

First, in a lot of authoritarian regimes that do not provide the option of turning the truths of our experience into legislation through democratic participation in an institutionalized manner, social media serves as the most vibrant arena for civil society participation. Also, social media functions as a responsiveness mechanism for the upper level authoritarian government to get to know the grievances that would not otherwise come across and build legitimacy among people. How do you view such phenomena? Should we view it as a complementary democratic element of an authoritarian regime, a possible arena to induce democratic change in authoritarian regime, or a system that facilitate the stableness of authoritarian regimes with some degree of compromise?

Second, from my point of view, the agency for change this authoritarian trend still largely lies in the hand of the engineers/tech companies. While technology is neutral and can be manipulated by supporters of authoritarianism, people who produce and own these technologies can take a stance against them. Take censorship as an example. Telegram was built to be a platform that promise users a safe space for public communication and refused to work with governments. It has turned out to be extremely helpful in a range of recent social movements.

[bhargavvader]

Thank you for the good read - I look forward to your talk tomorrow.

It seems more than ever that we must take social media or online forms of communication into our hands and out of corporations. They are driven by profits, and we are very clearly commodity. I was interested by the bringing up of cybernetics - it is indeed the starting point for the technological situation we are in, and especially our fetishisation with data, which is what powers social media today. Orit Halpern's brilliant 'Beautiful Data' (https://www.dukeupress.edu/beautiful-data) also uses Cybernetics as the start of her journey through humanities association and now obsession with data.

Maybe if we take the currency of social media (data) into our own hands, there could be more autonomy. But the complex power plays and agents involved in this game makes it difficult to predict what will create a better way for us to help build better lives for us.

[chiayunc]

Thank you in advance for the wonderful pieces. My question is: to what extent would you agree that it is not the social media per se that contributes to the "democratic backsliding" we are witnessing now, but rather the explosion of information and the limited cognitive bandwidth of users that is the problem, and social media is merely making the symptoms show?

Democracy backsliding has been a hot issue among scholarships, and the role of social media has been scrutinized. One could argue that the problem of democracy is no longer under-representation, but over-flow of information and the limited cognitive bandwidth of users. In other words, the primary concern of democracy today is not so much preventing authoritarianism but making it possible for constituents to make informed decisions responsibly. The latter is what is hard today.

One could argue, of course, Facebook and its reluctance to take the duty of fact-checking upon itself is what is worsening the situation, but does that mean a public sphere of debate now embedded within the internet is the source of the problem?

[dongchengecon]

Thanks a lot for your presentation! It is true that social media networks have spawned a new form of authoritarianism. Actually, authoritarianism is itself a part inherited from freedom of speech. With the development of technology, the basic change is the speed of moving from one equilibrium to the other. From the research perspective, I am wondering if that is possible to create some measurements of volatility of social media? Professor Matthew Gentzkow from Stanford University has written great papers about measuring political polarization. And the volatility measurement could serve as an indicator identifying the collective misbehavior.

[weijiexu-charlie]

Thanks for your presentation. As you have mentioned, "companies such as Facebook and Twitter are coming to dominate our public sphere to the same degree that Standard Oil once dominated the petroleum industry". Then, I'm wondering about what do you think these private companies should do if the data they own could more or less influence the elaboration of legislation?

[hesongrun]

Thank you so much for the wonderful and thought-provoking presentation. I could not agree more with your points in the articles. Nowadays, mass media nowadays can play a significant role in spreading ideas and beliefs. They have exerted great influence on our behavior and ideology. My question is what do you think is the fundamental reason why people would turn to authoritarianism blindly (like Germany in World War 2)? Is it because of psychological factors or something deep in our nature? Can we do something to safeguard against such tendency? Thank you so much!

[luxin-tian]

Thank you for the presentation. The article on Harper’s provides a sharp view of the role of the internet in political authorization. While it is true to criticize that social media, which features this digital age for almost every citizen around the world, incubates an unprecedented tool for authoritarianism or oligarchies to supervise and adopt propaganda. However, it can be hardly denied that social media, especially as it becomes decentralized, is also providing the general public a liberal place to express, debate, and advocate. Even in China, despite the government being very frequently criticized due to internet censorship, social media paves new ways for people to express their opinion to the public sector while many local governments open their official accounts to listen to the voice from the public. Even though the country can censor the internet, and there may exist national organizations that monitor the public sentiment, the internet does offer a mechanism in which public opinions can make an influence. To this extent, do you think more empirical evidence is needed to better depict the truth? And how do you comment on the way in which new technologies that drive decentralization of the internet, such as blockchain, can affect the future?

[heathercchen]

Thanks in advance for your presentation! As you mentioned in both of the two readings, the advance and popularity of communication technology, or mass media, has to some degree blinded people's individual rationality and thus "promoted" authoritarianism. Radio, newspaper and telephone has been used as successful propaganda tools for Hitler. We need to be cautious of authoritarianism nowadays, once again, when facing with another revolution of communication technology marked by the emergence of mobile devices and social media. What do you think are the unique and new characteristics of such technologies, like Facebook for example, may induce manic among public in a way that former traditional media cannot manage to do so? For example, from my point of view, the word limitation of social media nowadays, like "140 words at most" rule for Twitter, can possibility make its audience not able to see the full scope of an event, thus leads to biased view and irrational feelings more easily than a well-written column.

[skanthan95]

Thank you for the thought-provoking reading. As you've stated, "today’s social media will never be able to do the difficult, embodied work of democracy. Computer-­supported interconnection is simply no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the hard work of living together."

I wholeheartedly agree with this. But, given that virtual mediums have largely supplanted face-to-face conversation as a way to engage in political debate, and are here to stay - how would you recommend better approaching debate online?

More specifically: the (millennial) left is divided on the best approach for engaging in political debate with someone who holds opposing views. Some YouTubers, like Laci Green and Contrapoints, encourage streaming live debates with figures like Richard Spencer or Ben Shapiro and view that as a way to productively leverage social media to 'change minds', . However, others decry this approach because they feel that engaging with someone with "problematic" views implicitly validates them, and gives them a platform - sometimes, going as far as "cancelling" people for engaging (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/style/is-it-canceled.html). While both perspectives have merit, which do you think would be the most conducive to facilitating positive change through social media?

[dhruvalb]

Thanks for a great read! I am really looking forward to this discussion tomorrow.

You highlight that the ownership of social media remains private partly due to, “the political vision that helped drive the creation of social media in the first place—a vision that distrusts public ownership and the political process while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance” However, it’s not engineering but economics that dictates how social media companies operate. Platforms, like Facebook, thrive on ad revenues that they are readily able to generate by guaranteeing user engagement through sophisticated algorithms and intimate knowledge of human behavior. This has essentially change why ingenious engineering is employed in the first place. Even if institutions of state are invigorated, how can social media platforms be incentivized to work fairly for public good without endangering their rights as a private enterprise?

[sanittawan]

Thank you for giving a talk at our workshop and for both the book chapter and the article. It is fascinating to read how you traced the process and actors that contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany and in America. The book chapter and the article create an interesting parallel and contrast. Your article alluded to "reinvigorate the institutions" and "turning the truths of our experience into legislation." I am wondering if you could elaborate more on how you think the government can play a role in these two tasks. There have been talks about regulating social media and traditional media, but I am not convinced that leaving such task in the government's hands would solve the problems.

[MegicLF]

Thank you for presenting on such an interesting topic! The reading given is walking through a brief introduction of using mass media during World War 2 to spread the belief of fascism. And the journalists and scholars such as Adorno and Thompson all agreed that "mass communication could turn the individual personality and, with it, the structure of society as a whole in a totalitarian direction." Related back to the current time, mass communication media also played a significant role in the 2016 U.S. President Election and the Brexit. Trump, as a president who enjoys posting tweets the most, used Twitter as a tool to transmit his opinions to his supporters. And in the Brexit, a company name Cambridge Analytica used social networks like Facebook to affect Brexit vote. Could you please briefly describe your opinions on the role of mass communication media in these two events? Also, the similarity and difference between using mass communication in these two events and in fostering the Fascists during World War 2?

[RuoyunTan]

Thank you for your presentation! This is indeed a piece of history that I didn't know before. I was surprised to know that what has become today's Silicon Valley was originally built upon this notion of "independent from hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism". It was supposed to be just about technology advancement and individual freedom. But what if we put this idea into a global picture? The technology and communication industry, as is represented by Silicon Valley, has never been a place isolated from international politics. We can see this through the most recent ban that the US made on Chinese tech companies including Huawei. So could you share your thoughts on the relationships between today's technology industry, the global society, and international politics?

[tonofshell]

Unsurprisingly, tech companies who have been responsible for the the development of technological tools now used for spreading propaganda have suggested the use of more technology as the solution to this problem. Just a few weeks ago, Google released a data-set of Deep Fakes, to facilitate the development of AI that can recognize Deep Fakes, I assume, to prevent the manipulation of the general public by the use such technology. Do you think that technology can play an effective role in identifying and mitigating the spread of propaganda and other falsities or is this just a cat and mouse game?