How Technology Affects Our Democracy
by Samhitha Srinivasan
The ability of technology to help governments decipher how their citizens think, understand how their virtual actions affect one another, and manipulate their actions, seems more of a fantasy of the future than an unprecedented idea of the past. Technology is not a panacea; it has become a power that divides citizens into groups of winners and losers. For all citizens to be equally represented in their government’s democratic mission, aspects of technology can help citizens work towards an egalitarian society. However, more often than not, the power of technology, especially social media, leads to the polarization of our country and the surveillance and censorship of our people and their ideas.
Technologies have now become forms of power that have more than enough information on an individual to accurately predict their thoughts, monitor their behaviors, and persuade them towards a desired action, all without them knowing. Given the widespread adoption of technology and social media, it is now much easier for governments to surveil certain groups of people that they believe to be dangerous. These judgments can be based on race, religion, or socioeconomic status. Internet Freedom is defined by the “obstacles to access, limits on content seen and published, and violations of user rights.” In 2019, Freedom House gave China an Internet Freedom score of 10/100, based on violations of privacy, limits on content, and obstacles to access. (A score of 0 is the most restrictive a government could be). China uses tactics such as shutting down personal WeChat accounts that spread rumors about the CCP, filtering cross-border traffic by slowing down internet speed, and building the “Great Firewall of China”, a government enforced firewall which censors most international news outlets. With so much surveillance and censorship on the ideas of the people, China’s government is not considered a democracy. Understanding that technology could be used as an indestructible source for freedom of the people, some governments have learned to censor it for their benefit.
The most corrosive effect of technology is that it has contributed to the polarization of our country. For example, Facebook and Twitter have developed algorithms that show users only content that they would like to see. And given the mass amount of information they have collected on each user, they exactly know where our political ideologies lean. With all our information constantly tracked, this has serious consequences for our democracy. With access to data mining, social media companies, advertisers and bots can manipulate people into voting for specific political parties. What we see on social media has become an echo chamber giving us a false perspective on the real world. For example, in the 2016 election, I and so many other Democrats were so certain of Clinton’s win that we didn’t even realize that we were looking at politics at a skewed angle. We are constantly hearing the voices of like-minded people and bots that are designed to please us: “Social Media is programmed to align itself with an agenda that is unambiguously representative of a particular party. … It’s all ‘Crooked Hillary’ or ‘Trump is a puppet.’” Social media’s algorithm will try its best to feed us with a version of reality that we like to hear. We can only preserve democracy if we have a diverse set of viewpoints (both politically, socially, and ethnically). When Postman questions the value of technology, we must think about: “Who benefits from this tech? Which groups of people are favored? Which groups are harmed?.” It is no longer the users who benefit from being on social media. It is politicians, advertisement companies, people who have the power to impose ideas on the public who are the winners.
With the help of technology, we can bring together representatives of many ideas of the reality we live in. However, we must realize that the information brought to our attention is controlled by others who are in power. In the end, all these ideas are bridged into the progressive social reality that we adopt. Technology and its effect on society are controlled by how all factions of our society utilize it and whether it is used consciously to support the overarching ideas we value in a democracy.
Samhitha Srinivasan is a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University studying Cognitive Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence. Her interests lie at the intersection of music, technology and the brain. By engaging with the neuroscience and music department at CMU, she hopes to deepen her understanding of music and delve deeper into the role music plays in our lives. Outside of school, she loves to hang out with my friends and try new boba spots.