Social media, addiction, and democracy

Here are some startling figures. Of the roughly 7.8 billion people in the world, slightly over 2.5 billion of them were Facebook subscribers as of March 2020. More than 80% of these subscribers live in the countries comprising North, Central and South America. In countries such as Bhutan, Myanmar and Malaysia, the Facebook participation rate is close to 100% while in Indonesia and Nigeria, it is around 80%. That the world has become addicted to social media is an understatement but, as with any addiction, this is not necessarily a good thing even though it cuts across age, gender, race, education, and community lines.

This cancerous growth of social media is turning out to be a huge threat to societies in general, and democratic ones, in particular. Such a conclusion warrants careful explanation and adequate justification.

Over the decades, addiction has typically centred around tangible goods – narcotics (heroin, cocaine, opium, and cannabis), tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels and, specific to the United States, firearms. A variety of approaches have been taken by governmental and private organisations to combat addictions since they lead to loss of life, loss of productivity, violence, family strife, impact on the environment, etc.

In the case of drug addiction, the primary focus is on controlling the producers and distributors of narcotics and, secondarily, the users. The same goes for addiction to fossil fuel. As for controlling tobacco and alcohol addiction, the focus is on the users but not the producers. The addiction to firearms, unique to the US, is a problem that is hardly ever addressed, either at the gun manufacturer level or the gun owner level, despite the mass shootings that occur at regular intervals across the country, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.

A detailed analysis of these different approaches reveals a disturbing pattern in selective enforcement. Much of the heroin and cocaine destined for North America and Europe comes from the developing and under-developed world. For example, the Mexico-based Sinaloa cartel and the (now defunct) Colombia-based Medellin cartel, long considered to be the two most powerful drug trafficking organisations in the world, and the poppy-growing warlords of Afghanistan have been targeted for elimination by law enforcement agencies such as the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA, which is responsible for coordinating and pursuing US drug investigations both domestic and abroad, has officials attached to US embassies in over 60 countries, especially in Central and South America, South and Southeast Asia. However, when it comes to tackling user addiction, at least in the US, the emphasis of the ‘War on Drugs’ programme has been on mass incarcerations of African-American and Hispanic users rather than white users, even though the latter comprise a larger proportion of users overall.

Even though tobacco (including second-hand smoke) is universally regarded as one of the major public health hazards, few countries have prohibited the growing of tobacco. In 2004, Bhutan became the first country to completely outlaw the cultivation, harvesting, production, and sale of tobacco products. In the US, even though leading tobacco companies such as R J Reynolds and Philip Morris suffered huge financial losses from court cases pertaining to smoking-related cancer deaths, they are still very much in business and have since moved much of their manufacturing operations to Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. They have also actively engaged in preventing the adoption of smoke-free environment legislation across the globe.

While alternative energy sources such as solar and wind have reduced the demand for fossil fuels somewhat, nevertheless Big Oil has succeeded in reversing some of the clean air and pollution control legislation to further open up large areas of wilderness and the ocean floors for oil exploration. Also, Big Oil is now pressuring the US government to lean on Kenya to allow the dumping of plastic waste on their shores. Plastics are usually derived from petrochemicals.

Since 2012, social media platforms have been used to promote disinformation and hate speech during elections in many democracies across the globe, including the European Union, Mexico, United States, Britain, Brazil, and India. Last October, Facebook admitted that snooping software supplied by an Israeli company was used to spy on Indian journalists, activists and senior government officials who were using WhatsApp just prior to the May 2019 elections. As reported in the New York Times, when Canada announced new transparency laws last March requiring social media platforms to keep a registry of all political or partisan ads they publish, rather than comply, Google simply opted not to run any election advertising in the country. In the same NYT article, it was noted that Facebook had carried out a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to garner influence across the world, and threatening to withhold investments from countries unless they supported or passed Facebook-friendly laws. With the backing of the US government, no doubt.

In an interview given back in 1988, Milton Friedman, the guru of free market economics, stated that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy and that an authoritarian government that protected free markets was preferable to a democratic one that redesigned them. The same sentiment was recently echoed by Stephen Moore, a senior economic adviser to President Trump. Trump, of course, is addicted to Twitter and is the world’s most powerful misuser of social media for political and financial gain.

Social media is one addiction for which there doesn’t seem to be a cure. With friends like Facebook, who needs enemies?

(The writer is a computer scientist based in the US)