How Social Media are Perfect Tools for Autocrats

Following up from the previous post ‘How BUMMER Became a New Acronym for Social Media‘, there is some debate about the social destruction brought about by Facebook and the likes, and whether those applications do not undermine democracy – such as in this article in the New York Review of Books titled ‘The Autocracy App‘.

The article states in summary that:

Facebook as a company has lot control of the consequences of the usage of its services, that are being used by pressure groups and rogue users to create instability, chaos and even ethnic cleansing
There is a growing consensus that the power of such a dominating company needs checking, as the tools proves to be much more useful to autocrats while it undermines democracy. Addiction and closure of the horizon of people around their interests hurts the debate, while data can be used by autocrats against users.
There are several ways to deal with the situation, from an user movement (promoted by Jaron Lanier) to anti-trust regulation. However for the moment the current frameworks seem to have difficulties to be effective.

As any tool that becomes prevalent, Facebook demonstrates shortcomings in parallel to benefits. The fact that there is no real governance of the company with Mark Zuckerberg keeping the control does not help. I really believe that regulation is the only way, and there have been positive effects of european law on social media. This needs to be reinforced, because it is true that the impact of social media changes our world, and that democracy is impacted.