Democracy Hacked

by Martin Moore

You are known by hundreds of ‘data points’ that capture what you buy, what you earn, what you read, what you watch, who you know and what you care about. Merge this with campaign survey data and a candidate will know whether to lavish you with attention, appeal to you for a donation, or perhaps even discourage you from going out to vote.

Before the election of Donald Trump there was Narendra Modi’s Indian landslide in 2014, Rodrigo Duterte’s shock win in the Philippines in May 2016 and the Brexit vote a month later. After Trump there was Emmanuel Macron’s ascension in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn’s double-digit swing in the UK election the same year and M5S’s rise to dominance in Italy in 2018.

Those who saw how politically powerful these platforms could be, and used digital tools to pursue their political aims, benefited disproportionately. It did not matter if these aims were democratic, autocratic or anarchistic.

Facebook (and its subsidiaries WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger), Alphabet (notably Google and YouTube) and Twitter. Together these have become the virtual public sphere,

it was not Facebook that first developed the surveillance-based, behaviour-driven advertising model that powered content and communication on the net. It was Google.

The real question is, where will democracies go next?

Based on their reactions so far, they look like they will splinter in three directions: towards platform democracy; towards surveillance democracy; and towards a re-formed – ‘rehacked’ – digital democracy.

The following month in India, the world’s largest democracy, BJP leader Narendra Modi upset all predictions by securing the first absolute majority for a governing party since 1984.