AN enormous amount has been written and spoken about the recently concluded US election. The reasons for Trump’s surprise victory have been discussed and analysed ad infinitum. From globalisation to income disparity to racism, nothing has escaped the pundit’s scrutiny.
But one area has been largely limited to computer geeks, and could be a threat to the entire democratic process. I am talking about the arrival of Twitter bots — short for robots — that swarmed online in unprecedented numbers, planting millions of negative messages against both presidential candidates. For an idea about the pervasiveness of these software gremlins set loose on the internet by the opposing campaigns, Trump has some 20 million followers on Twitter, but around 80 per cent of his retweets are by bots.
A typical tweet by a bot called Marie reads: “#TrumpWinsBecause the American people are too smart to fall for lies anymore.” One malicious tweet by a bot informed readers that they could vote for Clinton by text. This was clearly an effort to persuade her supporters not to go to polling stations.
According to Wired, a webzine devoted to technology, a bot is relatively easy to create, and vendors sell them wholesale. Once set loose, they congregate automatically to intense online conversations like the recent US elections. Here, they fired their pro-Clinton or anti-Trump salvoes. But Trump outgunned Clinton in this battle of the bots: between their second and third debates, pro-Trump tweets outnumbered pro-Clinton tweets by seven to one.
For those unfamiliar with the world of Twitter and other social networking platforms, this will probably be pretty boring. But do pay attention as we could be witnessing the undermining of the whole electoral process. We do not yet know to what extent these online attacks influenced voters, but clearly they played a role in the process. And thus far, there are no regulations to restrict the use of digital means in elections. As people increasingly turn to the internet for information and to social networks for discussion, the invasive and malicious presence of artificially generated attack bots is a serious threat.
And it isn’t the only one. From Wisconsin and the other swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania where Trump won by small margins, come allegations that Russian hackers have distorted the results by interfering with the vote count by networked electronic machines. If this is found to be correct, the implications are staggering. Remote — and welcome — as the chances are of the result being overturned, the possibility that a foreign power could influence the outcome of an election is scary.
In fact, the US government has complained about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s internal emails to the Russians. This was an attempt to expose the pro-Clinton, anti-Sanders bias among Democratic grandees, and did cause the chairwoman to resign, while embarrassing Clinton. Again, the extent to which this influenced the result is impossible to say, but Bernie Sanders supporters were deeply disillusioned, and many refused to turn out for Clinton.
But these online threats are only part of the dangers posed to liberal democracy. As we have witnessed in the recent past, populism, identity-politics pitting religious and ethnic groups against each other, and growing income disparities resulting from globalisation are causing huge stresses that threaten to bring the post-Second World War edifice crashing down.
Brexit, Trump’s victory, and the rising tide of authoritarianism bode ill for liberal democracy. Right-wing politicians with little respect or time for the rule of law and human rights are now serious contenders for power. People like Putin, Erdogan and Modi have a groundswell of support as they are seen as can-do politicians who are decisive and get things done. Nationalism is the tune millions now march to around the world.
When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the hope was that in the absence of superpower rivalry, there would be no more proxy wars, and the world would be a more peaceful place as a result. This period also witnessed a surge in the number of countries replacing dictatorship with democracy. Pakistan was one of them. Many of us thought that a better world was around the corner. Dream on.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the American response set the stage for a quarter century of tension and vicious warfare in the Middle East. The end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan created a vacuum partially filled by the Taliban. This encouraged the entry of Al Qaeda into the region, and set the scene for 9/11 and all its subsequent horrors. The Arab Spring was stillborn in the face of the Saudi-financed counter-revolution.
Now, the paranoia and fear of Islamic terrorism generated by Western governments among their citizens has seriously eroded many civil liberties. In America, the police increasingly behave like an occupying army, armed as they are with weapons more familiar on battlefields than in cities. In Europe, too, the police tend to shoot first and ask questions later.
With an increasingly frightened public seeing the world through a media that hypes up the threat, politicians can exploit their fear to pass more draconian laws and fight distant wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya — all in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism. All these insecurities make issues like privacy secondary as spooks pry into our use of the internet and tap into our conversations as a matter of routine. Few even point out the obvious contradictions between such breaches of privacy and liberal democratic traditions.
Thus, democracy is being challenged on many fronts: by the climate of fear that has been deliberately created, to the rising use of digital means to subvert the electoral process. And while democracy has shown itself to be a robust system, it is not clear how long it will survive new digital technology and old fears and prejudices.
Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2016
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