Democracy and Google
It feels like are living in an evermore rapidly changing world in the 21st century. The rate at which technology develops impacts on our world in constantly shifting and in ever-new ways. As this series of articles may insinuate, democracy as a concept seems to be struggling to keep up with the changing times and as some have reported, been in decline this century[1]. This coincides with the explosive growth of the internet which now pervades every aspect of our lives whether in tracking our location, our shopping habits, and even our preferred home temperature.
Perhaps the best example of the ways in which the internet has transformed our lives is the creation of Google. As someone who has only ever known a world with Google, I cannot even imagine what a world where you cannot access near infinite information at would look like. Being able to search information about myself or the niche football statistics I often crave is something I take for granted. Beyond my own interests I use Google everyday for work, even for this article. Google’s seemingly benign presence is a staple in my life.
What was perhaps the most transformative moment in Google’s development was the moment Google moved to an advertised based model of generating revenue. As of 2014 90% of Google’s income came from advertising[2]. However, as in many other areas of the market, the landscape of advertising has drastically changed because of the internet. In the past, advertising companies would try and find the best location to post an advertisement. While there was definitely a talent to it, a lot of it was guess work and ads had varying success. However, with the amount of information companies now have on us as individuals the ads can be targeted with frightening accuracy. Even to the point getting an alert on your phone advertising jumpers on a particularly cold day as you walk past that very shop.
The implications of this model are that we as consumers are no longer being persuaded to consume what companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon want to sell. Instead what is most profitable is not selling us anything but harvesting as much data from us as possible in order to make their advertisers’ adverts as targeted and specific as possible. The more accurate advertising they get, the more money they get from companies looking to advertise. What this means is that we are no longer the consumers, but instead we are the product which is being sold to companies who pay for he adverts. Recently my flatmate got an email from Amazon saying that they were giving them a free Amazon Echo. They thought that it must be a hoax and looked into it, but it was true. Amazon were literally giving away their product for no reason other than they had an account. It is more financially prudent for them to give away their product for free. However, it is not truly free. What my flatmate is paying for it in exchange is the thousands of bits of information that the Echo will collect from her which will be sold to other companies for advertising.
The real question for us here at CiPol isn’t really about companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, but rather what this tech revolution and particularly companies like these mean for democracy in the UK. Has democracy been affected by the same kind of influences on the internet. The sad reality of the last few years is that democracy has similarly been affected. If we look across to the US we see how the Russians hacked the elections and there have been similar accusations of the same thing happening here in the UK.
Democracy is founded on the idea that people are equal and through voting have equal power to decide who runs their collective, whether it be nation state or parish council. Ideologies and leaders are presented and argued over and the most persuasive leader/ideal is voted on to lead the collective. This is very much an ideal and no democracy or election has ever functioned perfectly like this. However, with the access to internet and the capacity of advertising that has come in the 21st century, the landscape of democracy has completely changed. Political parties are no longer collectives that are arguing over ideas and who should run the country. They now are entities that purchase data about us, the people who they are meant to represent and sell us ideas in the same way (and literally the same space) that betting companies, toy makers and gyms do. The most scary example of this in the UK was the Cambridge Analytica data scandal during the Brexit referendum where the personal information of millions of Britons was harvested and used for political advertising.
Most of us like to think that we are immune to this kind of advertising, I certainly am inclined to be. However, in my own experience of the last few elections in the UK I have been fed through my social media platforms a very singular point of view which entrenches me from those who I disagree with. The reality is that if subtle advertising that affects the way we think wasn’t successful then it wouldn’t be an industry worth over 500 billion dollars.
Again, the advertising industry has always used to manipulate consumers and even voters, but what is different now is scale in which we can be implicitly led to vote in certain directions without our knowledge. The vast millions points of data that these companies and therefore political entities have access to mean that what is far more important to winning a national campaign is not incredible policy and a strong, capable leader but rather the knowledge of how to work in the advertising industry and the funds to pay for advertising.
What does this mean for democracy which needs constant positive engagement from voters from differing view points in regards to these platforms which advertise to us political ideologies? It shows that these platforms are not designed for healthy conversation that creates mutual respect and flourishing. Rather that they are designed for maximum engagement, regardless of whether it is positive or not. At CiPol we often hear people talking about how difficult it is to have good conversations about politics on Social Media platforms, and they are right. It is very hard to have those conversations, because those platforms aren’t designed for that.
Rather, arguments and healthy discourse rely on good relationships and ideally need to be held in person. But from a political party’s perspective now there is less and less need for this. What elections look like in the 21st century is not who has the best argument, but rather who has the loudest and most invasive argument. A poignant example of this comes from our last general election here in the UK. A BBC news article[3] stated that looking at the posts during the first 4 days of December in the run up to the election,
“for the Conservatives, it said that 88% (5,952) of the party's most widely promoted ads either featured claims which had been flagged by independent fact-checking organisations (including BBC Reality Check) as not correct or not entirely correct. The figure includes instances of the same claims being made across multiple posts.”
This is not to paint the Conservatives exclusively as the only party that is guilty of this. Parties all around the world are using the same tactics of bombarding voters with posts and ads that are factually incorrect or even misspelt. In fact, the more controversial, the better as it means the posts will get more coverage.
I believe that for democracy to survive in the 21st century there needs to be a strong fight back and regulation, both of companies harvesting data indiscriminately and to the use of this same data and platforms by political parties. If democracy relies on arguing ideas and engaging in informed debate, then we must protect our capacity to do so. There are already laws surrounding financing parties during elections campaign and creating transparency. However, there are almost no restrictions on parties using online advertising during elections.
The second concern politically is the power that tech companies have because of our political reliance on them in their shaping of news and opinion. However, these companies are not benign, neutral entities that have no agenda. They absolutely have their own agendas, predominantly (as businesses) money making and therefore extending their power. However they have no moral agenda in terms of improving society or the political discourse in our country. And yet, we outsource the ways in which they can access our information to the organisations themselves rather than making explicit the ways in which tech companies can access our information or use that information politically.
Tech companies have already spent millions in lobbying governments around the world to deregulate the industry and allow them to continue to access as much personal information as possible about people. However, if governments are lobbied, but also purchasing information from tech companies, there are few grounds for hope that governments will turn around and hold these companies to account. The regulation of politics from targeted advertising is central to protecting the relationship between government and the people it represents and should be accountable to. We need to protect democracy from a entirely new enemy. In the UK democracy needs to drag its laws and regulation into the 21st century in order to assure its place there.
Notes
[1] https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/DemocracyReport2020.pdf
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/060315/google-becoming-monopoly.asp
This article was written by Alasdair Howorth, CiPol Intern, as part of a Democracy series posted in July 2020.
Other articles in the democracy series:
‘Christians in Politics does not take specific political positions but attempts to foster good disagreement by encouraging thoughtful debate. Please get involved.’