Is Cancel Culture Canceling Democracy? Essay Example

In this paper, we will raise the awareness of modern social media and its effects on democracy. From elections to freedom of speech, we have seen many alarming examples of the influence of social media. Events like Pizzagate and voter fraud have left some American citizens calling out fake news. We must understand how social media and the internet can be used as a tool for the 3rd dimension of power (Influential power). Remember the last time you did a google search? Did you notice that that search became ads on other platforms? This is a way the social media owners and psychologists put their capital needs on to you. A company, group, or elite are the ones sitting on the other end of that deal with these owners, such as Mark Zuckerburg (owner of Facebook). Let's take a look at how these elites are using the most powerful tool in the world to influence the way you think, or even change an entire election.

We must take a look, firstly, at how the campaigns used advertisements, and information was used before the internet became a powerful tool. Let's go back to the 2008 Election between Barack Obama and John McCain. Nearly 13 years ago, the main source of information was through television, newspaper, and word of mouth. You probably remember the old saying ‘you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. 

Before 2010, the worldwide web wasn't a credible source of information as it is today. So, campaigners had to apply the majority of funds to television ads, campaign events, and appearing on shows. The majority of people that didn't attend these events or watch certain networks generally didn’t vote. As a citizen then, you would have to look for the information, instead of the information finding you. After the campaign was over and the election was done, citizens and candidates usually accepted the decision and moved on. However, we are currently in a time where this has been reversed and our nation's democracy is up for question.

Before we get into the big question, let’s define ways that the internet and social media could be abused by corporations. Over the years companies have used social media to market their products and create public branding. This has made marketing less expensive and way more demographically targeted. For instance, let’s assume a cellular company, A, wanted to acquire their direct competitors' customers, B. Company A would run a campaign that would show graphics and videos about their prices being better than Company B’s. The best part about this is they can select who exactly sees it based on their demographic and search history. So every time you searched for anything phone-related, you would see company A’s enticing advertisement to save money. This is how companies use social media, and the internet to influence purchases. This method is very similar to a political campaign but can be much more polarized than a $10 discount.

Let’s switch the scenario, Let’s say candidate A wanted to win Candidate B votes. Candidate A could run the same campaign as the cellular company. However, I think we can both agree that the cellular company has more money for social advertising. So where does the money come from and who exactly will the ads target? This is a big controversial topic. Some believe that exterior elites are funding these campaigns for influence in the presidential term. Others believe that these methods are all around being hacked by the same elites to ad dump all over the Internet. This is a huge invasion of democracy and the 3rd dimension of power.

Some candidates have even made a mass of fake accounts to post and influence others' decisions. These methods caused a huge increase in political polarization between parties and elites. In the 2016 election, President Donald Trump was accused of getting aid from Russia. Many news stations and journalists concluded that President Trump fabricated many articles and disinformation on Hilary Clinton on all major internet outlets. This caused major discomfort in many Americans and waived many votes to his side. Favoring news stations took a major capitalization on these campaign-released stories.

Major companies, like Fox News, get paid for views and are active on all media outlets. So when a company gets information whether real or not, they tend to capitalize on it if it can draw attention. News Stations can now quote other social media posts and comments to symbolize a point of view. This allows them to influence the viewers’ opinion and possibly escape defamation of character if those comments are not legit. With protection from deformation, News outlets can have their way with exploding topics and putting pressure on their targets. A good example is the 2019-2020 BLM movement. 

Names like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are very familiar in this movement. However, this movement has been around since the 2000s but had unprecedented popularity right before the election. The majority of these cases of African American deaths started their publication on Social Media. This isn’t anything new before 2019. However, it is new for some major news companies to be airing these events daily. Right before an election isn’t a coincidence. It also isn’t a coincidence that the movement started to die down after political tensions died down.

Before Donald Trump parted from office, there was a lot of social buzz about votes being miscounted and dead names on ballots. After the social buzz picked up, news companies capitalized on this claim. Not too long after Donald Trump declared he wanted a recount and temporarily refused to drop the office without a fight. Many examples of social media starting a story, then the news polarizes the story, and finally, elites influence decisions through the story. It becomes a question in democracy when we don’t know who is funding these posts. It becomes a threat when we start to realize that millions of fake social accounts could be run by a political candidate to influence your vote entirely.

There have to be more regulations and laws against elites running these ads and campaigns on social media. The government has to make laws to enforce big social companies to monitor their account creation and limit them as well. If there isn’t the implementation of this, then America will go to the higher bidder in the 2024 election race. This has become a worldwide problem. The internet will not stop growing. The expansion of devices and quicker accessible times are becoming more demanding. As these demands go up, the world starts to shift into a digital virtual world. Social media is a virus to democracy, because elites know it is easy to abuse platforms. Elites will continue to take advantage of these outlets and create more poisonous polarization in our world to gain power. America needs to make a tweet for democracy.

References

Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election”. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211 (October 7th, 2021)

Loader, B.D. and Mercea, D. 2011. ““Networking democracy? Social media innovations in participatory politics”. Information, Communication and Society”. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/5528/1/ (October 7th, 2021)

Luca Luceri, Silvia Giordano, Emilio Ferrara. 2020. “Detecting Troll Behavior via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study of Russian Trolls in the 2016 US Election”. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/7311/7165 (October 7th, 2021)

LUSIAH1, HENDRA, WAN SURYANI, ERRIE MARGERY. 2020. “The Influence Of Social Media Advertising, E-Marketing And Product Quality On The Process of Purchasing Nature Cosmetics”. http://www.iaras.org/iaras/filedownloads/ijcces/2020/016-0002(2020).pdf (October 7th, 2021)

Michael P. McDonald. 2018.  “National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789-Present”. http://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present (October 7th, 2021)

Pennycock, Gordon and David G. Rand. 2017. “Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking, Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity”. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3023545 (October 7th, 2021)