How the internet is really shaping political landscapes!
This picture was taken during the Nigerian 2019 General Elections. A voter checks for her name on the voter's list. Photo by Nnaemeka Ugochukwu on Unsplash.
by Deirbhile Ní Bhranáin
Junior Producer & Editor Global Digital Futures
“These platform companies have also made it very easy for politicians to be able to predict what is likely to happen and come with circumventing strategies to deal with those possibilities.”
On this week’s episode, Chipo spoke to Dr. Admire Mare about the impact of social media and fake news, particularly on the most recent elections in Zimbabwe. Their conversation touches on such important issues as the influence of social media on politics and the prevalence of cyber-propaganda. Listen to it here.
While the discussion focuses on the last Zimbabwean elections, it also touches on the impact of Internet shutdowns. Internet shutdowns are increasingly occurring on the African continent: in 2019, the continent totalled 25 documented instances of partial or total internet shutdowns, a significant increase on previous years. Many of these shutdowns occurred before or during election periods: for example the governments in Tanzania and Uganda both blocked access to most social media platforms prior to their 2020 and 2021 elections, respectively.
Similar shutdowns have occurred across the world in different contexts, for example the 2019 Internet shutdown in Sri Lanka following the Easter attacks at that time. Often, the common denominator among internet shutdowns of different kinds is the reason given by the government, which is usually to contain or prevent the spread of misinformation.
However, this question of misinformation - Misinformation about misinformation? - often sounds like too easy an excuse. The spread of misinformation often seems deliberate on the part of the government, particularly by those who are attempting to gain power. For example, purposefully generated misinformation seems likely in cases such as the Brazilian elections, where Whatsapp was used widely to spread misinformation, including “massive spamming operations” run by outsourced companies - which Whatsapp has only recently admitted is illegal. They have responded proactively by taking measures such as only allowing a message to be forwarded 5 times, which the company believes has contributed to a 70% cut in the spread of viral messages).
Similarly in the Philippines, politics are increasingly under the influence of Internet trolls available for hire by political parties. These “cyber troops” are people hired to work 8 hours a day on the social media of an invented character, whose online presence is fleshed out enough to accuse political opponents of being bots and get away with it. These savvy teams provide political opinions for hire to the highest bidder. They made a significant political impact in the last elections, and more recently have been influencing political rhetoric, for example around the Duterte government’s failure to adequately respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. This raises questions of whether cyber-propaganda could be the next labour market which can be outsourced to a different location. These cyber-savvy armies certainly seem much better equipped than some of their equivalents in the US, as we have seen from the recent (and unbelievably clumsy) ‘fake’ Amazon worker accounts in the run up to the workers’ vote on unionisation earlier this year.
The presence of corporations in elections and politics more generally is certainly scary. It brings back questions, which were touched on in this week’s episode, of whether the use of social media in elections is as effective an equaliser in political terms as it was made out to be. Research has shown that in the African context, the use of social media is actually increasing campaign costs and entrenching inequalities. At the same time, sources such as the Edelman Tust Barometer reveal the largest-ever drop in trust in the media in 2017.
However, despite the odds, social media users do have autonomy over what they share and, to an extent, what they believe. Recent research shows that 20% of respondents to a survey on fake news in Africa shared stories online which they believed at the time to be false or made up. Scary as the phenomenon of fake news can seem to be, perhaps there is something enduringly tempting in sharing fake news which validates a certain position.
Deirbhile Ní Bhranáin is an Irish author and journalist based in London. She is currently completing an MA in International Journalisms at SOAS. She is interested in the impact of the future on the present and on the utopian possibilities of narrative.