A Digital Age crisis

Propaganda and deception are perhaps two of the most pervasive elements in politics. Yet, the study of propaganda has received little attention from political scientists, and the longer-term consequences of the practice of political deception even less so. The rise of the ‘Digital Age’ and the rapid growth of digital platforms, while democratising access to and distribution of information, together have spelt the death of expertise and the decline of knowledge.

Internet-based digital communication has opened a myriad of opportunities for powerful actors, including the apparatus of the State, and non-State actors to manipulate the beliefs and conduct of the less informed and gullible public, sometimes to tragic consequences.

Digital deception refers simply to the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of the message. It is designed to mislead some target population. Recent events arising from the agitation over the farm laws, concerns about fake news, and foreign propaganda activities, culminating in the call by the government for ‘cyber volunteers’ to monitor digital communications raise profound questions at the intersection of deception and technology. Finding answers is especially important because circumstances have subsumed a wide array of stakeholders -- politicians, activists, the media, civil society, and the courts.

To understand the emerging crises of the Digital Age is, above all, to understand the conflicting ideas and attitudes that underlie them. The contentious politics of our time and the words and deeds of the protagonists and the antagonists, regardless of who you identify as the one or the other, cannot be understood except in the context of the issues that divide them. This division arises from a fundamental disagreement about the ends of life. If as a society, we never disagreed on the ends that we seek, human progress would be the poorer for it; and perhaps we would find ourselves replacing the governance of people by the mere administration of things, as appears the case now.

Political and ethical problems cannot be turned into technological ones. In essence, our own attitudes and responses to history unfolding may remain incomprehensible, unless we recognise the dominant issues of our own time. The most urgent of these, arguably, is the battle for the public mind space between two competing sets of ideas on what has long been the central question of the political state: the question of freedom and coercion; or from a constitutional perspective, rights versus duties.

Though the Supreme Court has weighed in on this question on several occasions, two operational issues continue to confound democratic practice: What are the limits to a citizen’s freedom to act as she will? And who, and to what degree, can restrict the citizen’s freedom?

It is axiomatic that the lesser the interference, the greater is the freedom; and it follows that the maximum freedom from interference consonant with basic social order and justice will most likely promote human progress best. The obverse of this -- and we should as a society guard against this -- is insidious coercion that compels each stakeholder of democracy to be constrained to her allotted slot.

The history of the 20th century in India and elsewhere has made these dangers all too plain. One problem more than any other that has time and again stood in the way of societies imbibing historical ideals -- justice, equality, fraternity -- is that of the one and the many. Neither political equality nor social justice is, for instance, compatible with Laissez-faire. This inherent conflict of values gets accentuated in a vast and diverse country like India and points to the urgent need to change the paradigm -- from the centralised politics of the few to decentralised political power by the many. This simply means we need more democracy, not less.

Pluralism must therefore determine political practise, and this is as true for the digital world. To seek one value or one central authority aided by cyber volunteers, if you will, to control and direct a hydra-headed monster is to assume that all values can be measured by one scale. To not recognise human beings as free agents and their daily struggles as compelling existential and moral choices is to practise statecraft as a simple operation that a slide rule might perform.

To counter political deception in the Digital Age, the principle of non-partisan enquiry would serve citizens well. Civil society must ask some fundamental questions: What is the frequency of lying in digital communications? Which stakeholders, and in what matters, are most likely to lie? What are the political consequences of their lying? Often, the notions of truth and falsehood are rendered meaningless because some ontologies are incompatible. For instance, people who have a religious ontology often cannot be brought into the secular realm; those who claim to be secular do not appear to agree on what secularism means. Therefore, for the citizens, the truth is quite simply the correspondence between what is claimed and empirical fact.

A digital lie comprises three components: a factual claim about empirical reality that can be proved wrong by commonly accepted methods; a statement made by someone who knew, or ought to have known, that it was untrue, when he or she made the statement; engaging in sophistry, or making a statement intended to deceive on the basis of empirically unverifiable statements. For the purposes of understanding political deception, half-truths must be held to be deception.

All people lie, all people speak the truth, some just more than others. Explanations for political deception are not that they are required for successful policy, still less that they serve the national or the public interest. There is no reason why those that constitute the digital public life should not be held to the same high standards of truth as immutable, as the common citizen. If it is any comfort, there always is a digital trail and therefore it should be easier to nail political deception, provided that as citizens, we learn to distinguish between truth and untruth.

(The writer is Director, Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru)