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But how much will it matter?
Over the past decade, the biggest tech companies came to feel less like traditional corporations and more like quasi-states: borderless empires whose decisions increasingly had geopolitical consequences, to the growing frustration of the nation states in which they operate.
During the rise of former President Trump and other authoritarians around the world, global attention sensibly focused on the worst aspects of this arrangement. As they grew, companies acquired a vast civic responsibility they were reluctant to accept. The platforms were motivated primarily by growth and profits, and many were structured to make their leaders unaccountable even to their own boards. In the meantime, platforms were exploited by adversaries — along with domestic politicians, led by Trump — spreading lies and sowing dissent in the United States and abroad.
From 2016 to 2021, then, it was only natural that pro-democracy forces largely came to believe that social networks could only have a corrosive effect on the world. Algorithms built to identify and promote the angriest and most outrageous sentiments would, over time, polarize populations and pave the way for their countries to be taken over by strongmen. Weak, largely outsourced content moderation would make it easy for authoritarians to rule through misinformation and incitements to violence. Social networks seemed to play a key role in democracy’s doom loop.
Perhaps they still will. But it has been striking, watching the horrific invasion of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin’s Russia began on Thursday, the degree to which social networks have been used in efforts to preserve democracy.
After being widely credited for Trump’s election in 2016, and preparing to initiate the biggest war of the social network era, Russia might have been expected to excel at information warfare. Instead, like the rest of the war, it has gone quite badly for them. It is Ukraine that has been masterful in its use of social media — and while that may not prove decisive in whether or not it overcomes Russia’s superior military, at the very least it complicates our understanding of big tech and democracy.
Today, let’s talk about how.
Start with the broader context. The United States played a critical role in damaging Putin’s credibility before the war even began. US intelligence agencies understood that an invasion was coming, the Biden administration shared that information publicly, and in doing so removed both Putin’s ability to launch a surprise attack and any efforts to create a phony pretext for doing so.
Those moves were not enough to prevent the invasion. But they did create a powerful trans-Atlantic alliance of democratic countries, creating a more unified front against authoritarianism than the world has seen in decades, and re-shaped the global order in a matter of days. Germany surprised the world by saying it would increase defense spending after decades of pacifism; famously neutral Switzerland said it would join the rest of the free world in applying economic sanctions to Russia; the European Union is sending jets to Ukraine.
At a time of plummeting trust in institutions, the collective force of these actions has been profound. There may be no greater depolarizing force on earth than a common enemy, and Russia’s murderous and erratic autocrat has given us one.
All of this is critical, I think, to understanding the moves platforms have made (and resisted making) over the past few days, and of the way the war has been received on those platforms. It is exceedingly rare to witness an event of such global importance in which the forces of good and evil are so clearly delineated. Everything we have seen on tech platforms so far is downstream of that.
Source: TheVerge
