MS 113 Some key concepts that you need to know to navigate th.docx

MS 113: Some key concepts that you need to know to navigate
through
the key reading – I will keep updating these
1.democracy
2.citizenship
3.public sphere
5. Nation and nationalism, nation-state, government,
sovereignty
4. oligarchy (polyarchy, plutocracy, aristocracy and so on)
4.capitalism
5.liberalism, neoliberalism
6.civic republicanism
7.socialism
8.authoritarianism
9.populism
10. fascism
11. Marxism -ideological, hegemonic, discursive
12.globalization
13.transnational media spheres
14. consumerism, neoliberal consumer democracy
15. social movements
16. identity politics
17. recognition and redistribution debate
18. political power
19. the notion of common good
20. the digital divide
21: digital public sphere
22. communitarianism
23. social construction of culture
24. poststructuralism
25. postmodern
26. modernity

27. civil society
28. civil disobedience
29. civic engagement
30. structure and agency
31. pluralism and multiracialism, multiculturalism
A NEW FRONTIER
SOCIAL MEDIA / NETWORKS
DISINFORMATION AND
PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW
IN THE CONTEXT OF
ELECTION
OBSERVATION
by Michael Meyer-Resende
Democracy Reporting International (DRI) operates on the
conviction that democratic,
participatory governance is a human right and governments
should be accountable to
their citizens. DRI supports democratic governance around the
world with a focus on
institutions of democracy, such as constitutions, elections,
parliaments and rules of
democracy grounded in international law. Through careful
assessments based on field
research with partners, DRI convenes diverse stakeholders to
promote policies that
strengthen democratic institutions. A non-profit company, DRI

is based in Berlin and has
offices in Tunisia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and
Myanmar.
Michael Meyer-Resende is a lawyer with twenty years of
experience in political
transitions and democratisation. Works in Europe, the Middle
East, Africa and Asia. His
professional experience includes two years legal practice in
Berlin, four years with the
Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR)
of the OSCE (Warsaw),
three years with the election team of the European Commission
in Brussels and
journalistic experience with the BBC. In 2006 he co-founded
DRI and serves as Executive
Director since then. He publishes it regularly in newspapers like
The New York Times,
The Guardian, Politico, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
think tank publications.
This publication was produced with the financial support of the
European Union.
Its contents are the sole responsibility of Michael Meyer-
Resende and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the European Union.
Graphic and layout design: Giorgio Grasso for Democracy
Essentials
Cover photo: Ezequiel Scagnetti
Interior photos: Victor Idrogo (pp. 3, 6-7, 17); Ezequiel
Scagnetti (p. 22)
CREDITS

3
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
I. SUMMARY
II. BACKGROUND
III. INTERNATIONAL LAW
AND NATIONAL LAWS
VI. EXAMPLES OF OBSERVING
IN ELECTIONS
V. MONITORING SOCIAL MEDIA:
THE TECHNICAL SIDE
VI. CONCLUSIONS
p. 5
p. 8
p. 11
p. 18
p. 20
p. 23

5
Social media and networks (henceforth ‘soci-
al media’) have become an essential space of
public and semi-public discourse. They have
shown their democratising potential by increa-
sing access to information and greatly lowering
the barrier of participation in public debates,
however, the last few years have also shown
some of the risks that are present in social
media. The low barriers to participation have
been used by various state and not-state actors
attempting to undermine electoral integrity by
spreading disinformation, intimidating stake-
holders and suppressing free speech.
The social media sphere is managed by a hand-
ful of big companies, which have only belatedly
woken up to the challenge and started to tight-
en user policies and to give more attention to
paid or unpaid content on their services. Of-
ten, they frame the problem in biological terms
(“healthy debate”) or vague terms like “positi-
ve” discourse, rather than acknowledging that
discourse is a social interaction for which a
rights-based approach is appropriate, which can
draw on an already agreed framework and inter-
national legal obligations.
The human rights discourse related to social
media has been mostly focused on one right,
freedom of expression, with many observers
rightly concerned about attempts to stifle free
speech on the internet. Additionally, there has
been concern over civil rights, in particular the

right to privacy. Where social media companies
have committed themselves to uphold human
rights, e.g. the Global Network Initiative, they
have focused on these two rights.
Another aspect of human rights protection has
hardly figured in the public debate or company
initiatives such as the Global Network Initiative:
the right to political participation (article 25 In-
ternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
ICCPR). This right is not only concerned with
the expression of opinions, but also with their for-
mation. This is an agreed concern in Europe as
can be seen for example by the existence of pub-
lic broadcasting in all EU member states. Opinion
formation is a crucial part of a “genuine” election
(as is specified in ICCPR article 25).
According to the UN’s Human Rights Committee
the right to vote in elections implies that “voters
SUMMARYI. SUMMARY
should be able to form opinions independently,
free of violence or threat of violence, compulsion,
inducement or manipulative interference of any
kind” (General Comment 25). These are exactly
the concerns raised about speech on social me-
dia: threats of violence, hate speech, manipulati-
ve interference for example through social bots
or through trolls. However, there has been little
debate on how these issues could be addressed in
the framework of human rights.

While private companies, like social media plat-
forms, are not directly bound by international
human rights obligations like the ICCPR, states
are expected to enforce human rights obligati-
ons also against private parties. In addition to
this indirect effect of human rights, the soci-
al media companies are also directly bound by
commitments they have made in various con-
texts, such as the Global Network Initiative or
obligations emanating from the agreements on
business and human rights.
As the formation of opinion is part of interna-
tional human rights obligations, the role of so-
cial media is a legitimate aspect of international
election observation. Furthermore, there is mas-
sive public interest in the issue; if international
election observation does not address the role
of social media, it risks missing an important
element of the process and thereby relevance.
While systematic research is still at the begin-
ning, there is no doubt that social media have an
impact in forming opinions.
Currently election observers are set-up to detect
traditional manipulations, say ballot box stuffing
or a dominance of the ruling party in the public
media, but they are not set up to monitor, un-
derstand and report on a serious disinformati-
on attempt. It is not a far-fetched scenario that
an election with tight competition, where one
percent can make the difference, will be hit by
a major disinformation attack. Russian actors

already tried to do so in the French Presiden-
tial elections. Traditional election observation
would have little to say in that situation. Already,
traditional election observation had little to say
on the biggest controversy around the 2016 US
elections, namely manipulative interference on
social media.
There are three major challenges in observing
social media. First, the obligation to allow opi-
nions to form free of threats and manipulation
is potentially large and not yet well-defined. Se-
cond, the space to be observed, interactions on
social media, is also huge. Observers would need
to know with some precision what to look for.
Any social media information posted somewhe-
re, on any channel, at any time could potentially
influence voters.
Third, the technical possibilities to retrieve
large data from social media networks have been
narrowing. Facebook, in particular, has become
much more restrictive in the wake of the Cam-
bridge Analytica scandal; it is not currently pos-
sible to retrieve structured data from Facebook
in a manner that is compliant with their Terms
of Service. However, some social media listen-
ing agencies do still have access to such data,
and researchers can still use web scraping to re-
trieve data. But even if huge amounts of structu-
red data could be retrieved, analysing this data
requires specific technical skills, which creates
its own limitations. Furthermore, a lot of soci-
al media interaction is moving into closed chat
groups, which cannot be monitored by interna-
tional observers.

8
Why Social Media Matter in Elections
Four billion people, more than half of the world’s
population, uses the internet and three billion
use social media regularly. Internet penetration
varies widely country-by-country1 and so does
news consumption through social media.2
Concerns about the role of social media in elec-
tions have multiplied in the last years, triggered
in particular by Russian interference in the US
2016 elections. The problem appears to spread.
The Oxford Internet Institute notes:
“The number of countries where for-
mally organised social media manipula-
tion occurs has greatly increased, from
28 to 48 countries globally. The majority
of growth comes from political parties
who spread disinformation and junk
news around election periods. There are
1 Data from the Global Digital Report 2018 by We are
Social and Hootsuite. As both are companies offering social
media related services, the data should be seen with some
caution. They can be downloaded here: https://wearesocial.
com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018
2 Reuters Digital News Report 2018.
more political parties learning from the

strategies deployed during Brexit and
the US 2016 Presidential election: more
campaigns are using bots, junk news,
and disinformation to polarise and ma-
nipulate voters.”3
Research is only at the beginning and it cannot
be determined with certainty how influential so-
cial media are in forming opinions. The answer
will differ from country to country and from
constituency to constituency. In some coun-
tries Facebook alone is so dominant that people
do not know the difference between ‘Facebook’
and ‘the internet’, in other countries tradition-
al media remain influential and more trusted
than content that emerges in social media with
murky or unclear attribution
It is beyond this paper to review the state of the
research on social media influence on elections.
On one end stands a much-cited study on the
2010 US Congressional elections, which found
3 Bradshaw, S., Howard, P.N., Challenging Truth and Trust:
A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipula-
tion, page 3
SUMMARYII. BACKGROUND
9
that the addition of a button that stated “I vot-
ed” on a user’s Facebook site, increased the like-
lihood of his/her friends to also turn out to vote

by 2%. This would be a significant effect and
while higher turn-out is good in principle, such
a potential to increase turn-out could be abused
(for example to only mobilise in certain social
constituencies or geographic areas).
The disinformation threat of the 2016 US Pres-
idential elections was described thus: “In the
final three months of the US presidential cam-
paign, 20 top-performing false election stories
from hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs gener-
ated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments
on Facebook. Within the same time period, the
20 best-performing election stories from 19 ma-
jor news websites generated a total of 7,367,000
shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.”4
On the more sceptical side of research a 2017
study concluded that ‘fake news’ were highly
unlikely to have influenced the 2016 US elec-
tions in significant ways.
Despite the mixed research results it stands to
reason that social media have a significant im-
pact, in particular in countries with weak tradi-
tional media and channels of communication.
The subject is therefore acute for the election
observation community. It is long accepted that
the public discourse and debate around elec-
tions is an essential part of any electoral process.
It is for this reason that election observation
missions conduct systematic monitoring of tra-
ditional media sources.
4 Silverman, C., 2016 This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake
Election News Stories Outperformed Real News
On Facebook, Buzzfeed News, November 16, 2016. https://

www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-
news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook
Academic studies naturally cover elections that
are many months or years passed. Little efforts
have been made to follow social media in real
time as elections happen, in the way election ob-
servers may do. Social media in on-going elec-
tions still resemble mostly a black box.
Definitions
This paper is about international law, election
observation and disinformation; the latter as de-
fined by the European Commission High-Level
Group’s report: “Disinformation (…) includes all
forms of false, inaccurate, or misleading infor-
mation designed, presented and promoted to
intentionally cause public harm or for profit.”
Other notions like ‘fake news’ should be consid-
ered as catchwords of public debate that are not
suitable for a facts-based debate. In this paper
the focus will be on:
- Disinformation aimed at influencing elec-
tion outcomes (the example would be the
Russian Internet Agency buying political
advertising, aimed at US Facebook users,
trying to influence the US public debate).
- Disinformation that has the capacity to in-
fluence election outcomes, even if that is not
the intention.5 An example here would be
the false news sites with sensational, untrue
claims for the American electorate, which
Macedonian teenagers created in order to

draw traffic that could be monetised by sell-
ing advertising space.
5 Some call wrong information without harmful intent ‘mis-
information’, see e.g. ‘Information Disorder’, Council of Eu-
rope, 2017, page 5
10
In the literature a distinction is often made be-
tween social media and social networks. The
former would be services like Twitter which are
aimed at reaching a broad public (anybody can
read the tweets which somebody posts), while
networks are aimed at connecting people with-
out the intention of reaching the public, such
as WhatsApp. Many services combine both as-
pects. Facebook allows the creation of public
websites (political parties use such sites) and
even for private accounts allows that posts are
publicly posted.
For the purpose of discussing elections both
types are relevant, because manipulation can
take place on both of them. There have been re-
ports for example, that WhatsApp groups are in-
creasingly used to spread false rumours or incite
violence in elections.6 So with the focus on dis-
information it may not be useful to break down
these categories too much.
Even outside social media and networks, disin-
formation is a concern. In elections questions
have been raised about how Google lists search

results. Lastly, even the appearance of tradition-
al media online may be of interest: A newspa-
per may sort its articles in one way in its print
versions but gives prominence to completely
different articles online and yet promotes differ-
ent items (articles, videos, etc.) in various social
media. (For election observation it is useful to
think of digital content in general.) In this paper
we use the term social media as a generic term
to include social networks as well.
6 The Guardian, Fears mount over WhatsApp’s role in
spreading fake news, 17 June 2018 https://www.theguard-
ian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/fears-mount-over-
whatsapp-role-in-spreading-fake-news
‘Social media monitoring’ is used to denote the
idea of social media discourse being an exten-
sion of electoral monitoring, insofar as political
discourse takes place on social media. In oth-
er contexts, like business, the term ‘social me-
dia listening’ is more often used for this type
of activity. In business social media listening is
a wide-spread practice to follow how company
products are being discussed in social media.
Framing such an activity as ‘listening’ is howev-
er not advisable, because it creates mental asso-
ciation with spying, when in fact election obser-
vation is a transparent, publicly known activity.
This briefing paper seeks to give impetus to the
debate on three questions:
- What does international human rights law,
the reference point for international elec-
tion observation, has to say about social me-

dia in elections?
- What has been done practically by observ-
ers to monitor social media in elections?
- What else could be done and how should
international election observation missions,
which have the ambition to comprehensive-
ly follow an election approach the task?
11
A genuine democratic election process requires
that candidates and political parties can commu-
nicate their messages freely, that voters receive
diverse information, that they can discuss it
freely and are able to make an informed choice.7
International law protects free communication
as a cornerstone of any democracy. In the words
of the UN Human Rights Committee which
monitors the implementation of the ICCPR:
“The free communication of information and
ideas about public and political issues between
citizens, candidates and elected representatives
is essential. This implies a free press and other
media able to comment on public issues with-
out censorship or restraint and to inform pub-
lic opinion. The public also has a corresponding
right to receive media output.”8
As the quote makes clear, the focus has been on
the freedom of speech for a long time and rightly
so. One of the great impediments to democratic

elections have been undue restrictions to free-
dom of speech, especially in authoritarian states
7 For more, EU Election Observation Handbook, page 78.
8 General Comment 34 on Article 19, point 13
or outright dictatorships. These concerns re-
main relevant and apply to online expression of
opinion as much as to offline expressions. Many
elections have been overshadowed by undue re-
strictions of the internet in order to stifle debate.
In many countries draconian cybercrime laws
are used to silence free political debate. Based
on such laws, websites are closed down, posts
deleted, and users prosecuted for expressing
their opinion. For example in Egypt the website
of Al-Jazeera and the Egyptian site Mada Masr
were closed down. Reportedly 35 journalists,
bloggers and citizen journalists are detained in
Egypt.
The freedom of speech is not unlimited and re-
strictions are permitted based for example on
national security, ordre public, or the rights or
reputation of others. But in many cases restric-
tions are disproportionate and political criticism
is labelled as terrorism or a threat to national se-
curity.
The new threats to democratic discourse in elec-
tions do not only emanate however from restric-
tions to freedom of expression, but rather from
SUMMARY

AND NATIONAL LAWS
12
a manipulative use of social media and other on-
line content. This threat is different. It cannot be
conceptualised as a freedom of expression prob-
lem. In fact, many disinformation actors may use
freedom of expression as a justification: Are the
Macedonian youth not allowed to publish what-
ever they want, including fake news websites?
Did the Russian agency that bought advertising
space on Facebook to influence American elec-
tions not use their freedom of speech?
A different perspective emerges from the right
to political participation. It is premised on two
pillars: freedom of expression, but also on the
systemic aspects of opinion formation (and not
only expression). The UN’s Human Rights Com-
mittee, the monitoring body of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) noted in
its General Comment 25 (right to vote and polit-
ical participation):
“Persons entitled to vote must be free to
vote for any candidate for election and
for or against any proposal submitted
to referendum or plebiscite, and free
to support or to oppose government,
without undue influence or coercion of
any kind which may distort or inhibit
the free expression of the elector’s will.

Voters should be able to form opinions
independently, free of violence or threat
of violence, compulsion, inducement or
manipulative interference of any kind.”9
The mention of undue influence, distortion, in-
hibition and manipulative interference points to
the relevance of Article 25 for the quality of pub-
lic discourse. It is noteworthy that the Human
9 UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment 25,
1996, point 19
Rights Committee adds to these that “reason-
able limitations on campaign expenditure may
be justified where this is necessary to ensure
that the free choice of voters is not undermined
or the democratic process distorted by the dis-
proportionate expenditure on behalf of any can-
didate or party.” So campaign finance questions
are an integral part of the idea of free opinion
formation as a basis of genuinely democratic
elections.
However, while there is ample literature on free-
dom of expression and the internet10, the ‘no-ma-
nipulation’ aspect of Article 25 has not been
explored, especially not in its practical implica-
tions. In its new draft guidelines on public par-
ticipation, the Office of the United Nations Com-
missioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) merely
notes that “ICTs could negatively affect partic-
ipation, for example when disinformation and
propaganda are spread through ICTs to mislead
a population or to interfere with the right to seek
and receive, and to impart, information and ideas

of all kinds, regardless of frontiers” (point 10).
The contours of the obligation to keep discourse
free of manipulation should be explored by the
human rights community. Would this for ex-
ample represent a potential, legitimate limita-
tion to freedom of speech? How could the wide
language in General Comment be concretised?
What comparative experience from national law
could be used?
10 For example: Council of Europe, Recommendation
CM/Rec(2014)6 A guide to Human Rights for Internet Us-
ers – Explanatory Memorandum, , 2014; Declaration on the
Internet Governance Principles, 2011; Office of the Special
Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, Freedom of Expression and
the Internet, 2013; OSCE Representative on Freedom of the
Media, Internet Freedom – Position of the Representative
on Internet Freedom, 2012.
Social media companies would often be the
main addressees, as they shape discourse on
their platforms through their user policies. But
international human rights obligations do not
apply directly to them. However, the UN Human
Rights Committee noted:
“The positive obligations on States Par-
ties to ensure Covenant rights will only
be fully discharged if individuals are pro-
tected by the State, not just against viola-
tions of Covenant rights by its agents, but
also against acts committed by private

persons or entities that would impair the
enjoyment of Covenant rights in so far as
they are amenable to application between
private persons or entities. There may be
circumstances in which a failure to ensure
Covenant rights as required by article 2
would give rise to violations by States Par-
ties of those rights, as a result of States Par-
ties’ permitting or failing to take appropri-
ate measures or to exercise due diligence
to prevent, punish, investigate or redress
the harm caused by such acts by private
persons or entities.” (paragraph 8).
This area of the ‘horizontal effect’ of human rights
is complex and depends on practices in each state.
While these cannot be explored in this paper, an
argument can be made that governments have an
obligation to ensure that social media companies
organise discourse on their platforms in a man-
ner that does not unduly distort or allow manip-
ulative interference in order to guarantee proper
public participation in electoral processes.
The framework for business and human rights pro-
vides a wide range of obligations that are relevant to
the question of human rights, democracy and social
media. Most of these obligations belong to the arena
of soft law. The most relevant one from the list of UN
Guiding Principles include:
• Business should “seek to prevent or mitigate
adverse human rights impacts that are directly
linked to their operations, products or services
by their business relationships, even if they have

not contributed to those impacts” (No. 13): Be-
yond direct business conduct, this obligation high-
lights that business needs to give attention to the
impact of its products. Arguably this is a concern,
for example in the case of Facebook which in many
countries has no offices and enough staff with local
knowledge to understand what is happening on its
platform. Or, Facebook did not notice the Russian
interference in US elections.
• The need to have policies and processes that
ensure human rights conformity (no. 15).
• Human rights due diligence (no. 18): Business
should track and analyse its impact, remedy prob-
lems and monitor their effectiveness.
• Report publicly on human rights impact and
measures taken (no. 21).
• Treat the risk of causing or contributing to gross
human rights abuses as a legal compliance issue
wherever they operate (no. 23 c.): This may be
relevant for example in genocide campaigns (see
discussion on Rohingya in Myanmar) or massive
political repression.
• Prioritize actions to address actual adverse hu-
man rights impacts, business enterprises (avoid
delayed response that would make them irre-
mediable): This obligation has an impact on the
speed of responses for which social media compa-
nies are often criticized.
In various fora most major businesses have commit-
ted to uphold human rights, for example in the Glob-

al Compact and under Corporate Social Responsibil-
ity commitments. The tech companies have restated
such obligations in the Global Network Initiative (“ICT
companies should comply with all applicable laws
and respect internationally recognized human rights,
wherever they operate.”).
BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS (CORPORATE SOCIAL
RESPONSIBILITY)
14
An additional tension between political partic-
ipation and Article 19 may lie in the fact that
most elections are a national exercise and some
restrictions may be justified to ensure that opin-
ion is not massively influenced from abroad (in
addition, opinion broadcast from abroad could
evade campaign finance restrictions as well as
national election coverage regulations). Indeed,
companies like Facebook and Google have tight-
ened rules and now require that political ads can
only be bought by persons based in the country
to which the ad is addressed.
Article 19 ICCPR stresses on the right to re-
ceive and impart information “regardless of
frontiers”, while the European Convention on
Human Rights notes that nothing in its articles
protecting rights (expression, assembly, associ-
ation, no discrimination) “shall be regarded as
preventing the High Contracting Parties from
imposing restrictions on the political activity of
aliens.” (Article 16 ECHR).

Discourse free of “manipulative interference”
or without “undue distortion” is a wide, rather
than a precise standard. There are obvious cases
that clearly seem to fall under it: When a Russian
agency that is close to the government pays ad-
vertisement in the US that supports extremists
right- and left-wing causes, it seems clear that
it is designed to manipulate the public debate in
order to create extreme polarisation. However,
most issues are less clear.
The problems of discourse on social media are
complex from a human rights perspective:
- Targeted ads/dark ads: It is not clear
whether the possibility of targeting political
ads at users, which other users do not see,
affects the right to political participation.
Do they represent in some ways an undue
manipulation, especially when based on
psychological profiling? Certainly they need
to be looked at from the angle of election
campaign financing provisions. Otherwise
targeted ads are mostly considered a prob-
lem of civil (rather than political) rights, for
example when specific ethnic categories are
targeted with job ads. It is noteworthy how-
ever that Facebook has accepted their rel-
evance to the integrity and transparency of
elections in principle and changed its policy.
Users should now be able to see who posted
an add and allow everybody to search an ar-
chive of political ads (at the time of writing
it only seems to show US and Brazilian po-

litical ads).
- The use of social bots (i.e. automated ac-
counts): Social bots are used for many pur-
poses that do not raise concerns (car navi-
gation or banking for example), especially
because they are transparently automated
speech. Bots become problematic when
they conceal the fact that they are auto-
mated and used to artificially inflate en-
gagement on social media, for example pre-
tending that there is wide public traction
on an issue. Given that public engagement
not only influences how users may look at
an issue (“if so many people are concerned,
maybe I should too?”), it may also influ-
ence how prominently stories are posted in
a newsfeed. The more engagement a story
has, the higher it will be posted with more
people. Facebook and other social media
companies have increased their efforts to
close down fake accounts, but the struggle …
UCL Press
Chapter Title: Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism
Book Title: Social Theory after the Internet
Book Subtitle: Media, Technology, and Globalization
Book Author(s): Ralph Schroeder
Published by: UCL Press. (2018)

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60

3
Digital media and the
rise of right- wing populism
Studies of the internet and politics often focus on progressive
politics –
on the internet as a democratizing influence or on movements
such as
Occupy Wall Street in the United States. The other main area is
the devi-
ant internet of hackers and mischief- makers like trolls. What
gets far less
attention are retrogressive mainstream political forces such as
right- wing
populism, which, I will argue, have been the single most
important politi-
cal change in at least three of the countries examined here (in
China,
they are among the most important). To make the argument, this
chap-
ter compares four right- wing populist movements: Donald
Trump in
America, Narendra Modi in India, the Sweden Democrats and
Chinese
nationalists. Digital media have been a necessary precondition
for the
success of all four, but in quite different ways, depending on
the media
system, including digital media, in each country. Common to all
four,
however, is the fact that digital media have bypassed traditional
media
gatekeepers.
Trump’s success in becoming the Republican candidate was

achieved by dominating the agenda of mainstream media via his
use of
Twitter. In India, Modi used Twitter to mobilize his Hindutva
support-
ers to become elected as prime minister; like Trump, he
circumvented
his own party. Sweden Democrats have online newspapers that
create
an alternative to the consensus in public broadcast media and
among
parties that lock them out. And in China, the government
uneasily keeps
in check extremists who promote the stronger assertion of a
national-
ist agenda using social media. In all four countries, populist
politicians,
parties and movements have used digital alternatives to get
around the
mainstream media, which populists and their leaders perceive as
biased
against them. In doing so, they have been able to promote a
message
online that is less visible in traditional media, partly because it
would
2020 08:20:55 UTC
d i g i ta l M e d i a a n d t h e R i S e o f R i g h t-w i n g p
o p u l i S M 61

be more contested there, and sometimes because their message
is unac-
ceptable within mainstream media or is against media
regulation. The
strength of populism cannot be understood without a theory that
takes
into account how new technologies enable parties and
movements to
become counterpublics that reshape the political agenda
in media.
To understand this force, we must define populism. It has been
defined as a belief that ‘juxtaposes a virtuous populace with a
corrupt
elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of
political power’
(Bonikowski and Gidron 2016, 1593; see also the review in
Gidron and
Bonikowski 2013; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013; Mudde 2016 for
a recent
account of European populisms). Populists, in Mueller’s view
(2016),
claim that they are the ‘100 per cent’ people. They are the only
true and
virtuous people whose views are underrepresented and they
want to
exclude ‘others’ from the right to full citizenship in the nation.
Mueller
also defines populists as anti- elite: they are against the media
and the
political ‘establishment’ in the case of right- wing populists and
against
wealthy economic elites in the case of left- wing populism
(which is out-
side the scope here since it plays a much more minor role in the
four

countries examined). In addition to being the ‘100 per cent’
people and
anti- elitist, a third characteristic of populists is that they
espouse the
ideal that the government should more adequately represent ‘the
people’,
which is where media come in.
The ‘exclusionary’ characteristic of populism raises a question
or
paradox that can be dealt with immediately: namely, are, or can,
popu-
lists, once they are in power, be democratic? Populist parties
can form
parts of or dominate governments, and there can be majorities in
favour
of a populist agenda without forming parts of government. If
populists
rule or govern, however, they cannot be more adequately
represented
since they would have become the ‘100 per cent’ people and
will have
become the elite (unless there are two versions of populism in
the same
state). This paradox can be resolved by pointing out that the
character-
istics that make parties or movements populist will diminish
when they
come into power, although they can of course still pursue
stronger pop-
ulist agendas when they are in government. Mueller argues that
popu-
lists are anti- pluralists and so antidemocratic, that their aim is
always a
moral one, and Bonikowski and Gidron (2016) say it is mainly a
tool of

‘political challengers’. But it is also possible to define them
without this
moral component, and to recognize that they can change their
colours
when they are no longer challengers. Their claims that their
version of
the ‘people’ needs more representation and that they are against
estab-
lished elites may lose force when they are in government.
However, an
2020 08:20:55 UTC
S o c i a l t h e o R y a f t e R t h e i n t e R n e t62
‘idealistic’ belief system or ideology is not unique to right- or
left- wing
populists. Populists change once they are in power, but there is
nothing
inherently contradictory or antidemocratic about espousing a
stronger
or more ‘exclusionary’ representation of ‘the people’ (though
the exclu-
sion of ‘others’ is anti- pluralist and in this sense populism is
also illiberal).
A general account of the causes of populism is outside the
purview
here; the main aim is to understand what role is played by
traditional
and digital media. It is relevant to note at the outset, however,

that,
for the four cases under consideration, a purely economic
explanation
(Judis 2016) is insufficient. It is not just economically
disadvantaged
groups that turn to populism, and populism has not just been a
response
to economic crisis (which does not coincide with the timing or
the eco-
nomic well- being or otherwise in the four cases here). Any
explanation
of populism must focus squarely on politics: it is about
excluding those
who are not part of ‘the people’ from full citizenship. This
applies to left-
wing populism, too, but here the ‘exclusion’ is economic and
the enemy
are economic elites, whereas right- wing populism aims to
restrict and
strengthen especially social citizenship rights to co- nationals
against
‘others’ such as immigrants. Over the course of the twentieth
and twenty-
first centuries, the main force for social change in the developed
world
has been the interplay of classes and nations over the extension
of citi-
zenship (Mann 2013), but in the twenty- first century, class and
nation
are becoming intertwined in populism. In the developed world,
and per-
haps beyond, limits are emerging to extending social and other
citizen-
ship rights (Schroeder 2013). And these limits produce support
within
civil society for those who want to restrict these rights to ‘the

true people’
and harness their anti- elite political representatives to this
agenda.
Furthermore, politics is not just domestic: external enemies are
also
supposedly threatening the nation, economically and
geopolitically, and
a populist agenda aims to overcome these threats and put the
national
interests of ‘the people’ first. Thus, religion, ethnicity and
immigration
play a role in all four cases. But it is not just negative ill-
feeling or racism
towards other groups within the country or externally that
defines pop-
ulism, as with right- wing extremist or anti- immigration parties
focused
on this single issue. Populists are also anti- elite, and want the
‘virtuous
people’ to be more adequately represented in government
beyond the
issue of immigration alone.
Nevertheless, there are different varieties of right- wing
populism. It
is useful to distinguish between Sweden and the United States
on the one
hand, where populists have gained traction largely, though not
exclu-
sively, with anti- immigration policies, as against India and
China, with
2020 08:20:55 UTC

o p u l i S M 63
religious/ ethnic and nationalist/ ethnic versions of ‘the people’
respec-
tively, and which focus more strongly on the corruption of
elites. Still,
this difference is a matter of degree; a nationalist and anti- elite
agenda,
and the demand for more ‘true’ representation, is characteristic
of all.
It can be mentioned that an admixture of left- wing populism,
which is
aimed against ‘rich’ corrupt elites, is particularly prominent and
difficult
to separate in the Chinese case, though elements of animosity
towards
corrupt elites can be found in all four cases. And again, in all
four, one
external enemy is economic globalization, though Modi’s
populism (and
some elite factions in China) also favours a more capitalist
agenda in
order to strengthen the nation. The threat of Islamic terrorism,
too, plays
a role in all four cases.
A crucial point to stress at the outset is that any explanation
that
takes into account only digital media on the one hand or
populist forces
on the other is insufficient. Both are necessary. Populist

ideology can-
not simply be seen as a media construction or the beliefs of
leaders and
parties that have been foisted upon ‘the people’. Instead, the
strength of
populism rests on the social conditions that give rise to
movements and
parties which define ‘the people’ in exclusionary terms and rail
against
elites. At the same time, I will argue that the success of
populists, their
strength in the four cases examined, could not have been
achieved with-
out non- mainstream digital media. Put differently, populists
have gained
a disproportionate advantage with digital media compared to
how they
fare in traditional media, and compared to how established
parties or
political movements use media.
3.1 Trump’s ascent via Twitter
In the 2016 presidential primaries, Donald Trump dominated the
news headlines on the side of the race to become the nominee
for the
Republican Party, even though he was a party outsider and the
party
favoured insider candidates. His dominance was achieved
largely
because of social media, mainly Twitter (though he also used
other social
media such as YouTube and Facebook), where he tweeted
controversial
positions on a range of issues. These positions then featured
prominently

in television newscasts and newspaper headlines. Many of these
head-
lines were critical of Trump’s positions, which were far from
the political
mainstream and promoted a populist right- wing agenda,
including, most
controversially, an anti- immigrant stance. Yet the headlines
ensured that
his views received a disproportionate amount of attention. The
relation
2020 08:20:55 UTC
between the number of tweets in which Trump and other
candidates are
mentioned and their coverage in mainstream media over the
course of
the primary campaign and beyond has been tracked at http://
viz2016.
com/ (Groeling et al. 2016). It shows a clear correlation: Trump
is men-
tioned in tweets far more than any other candidate in both
parties, often
more than all the other candidates combined, and the volume of
tweets
closely tracks his outsize coverage in the dominant mainstream
media
(which, in the same tracking analysis, includes CNN, Fox News,

MSNBC,
ABC, CBS, NBC and local news). Polling data (such as http://
www.
realclearpolitics.com/ epolls/ 2016/ president/ us/ 2016_
republican_
presidential_ nomination- 3823.html) confirms that Trump
pulled ahead
of other Republican candidates in synchrony with his dominance
of the
media attention space, despite the fact that his nomination as
Republican
candidate was opposed by the party up until the party’s
convention and
beyond.1
Traditional news media were compelled to give a lot of time to
Trump’s views since, as we have seen, the American media
system is
characterized by horse- race politics and market competition for
audience
share. Tomasky (2016) quotes the television executive Les
Moonves, who
said during the primary election campaign that ‘the Trump
phenomenon
“may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” ’.
The ‘free’
extensive media coverage also meant that Trump had to spend
far less
on political advertising than his rivals. Furthermore, journalists
cover-
ing the campaign, themselves extensive users of Twitter,
eagerly picked
up newsworthy items on Twitter. Hamby (2013) has argued that
Twitter
has changed presidential political campaigns, with journalists
relying on

Twitter as a major source, not just to follow candidates and
campaign
teams but also to follow each other. However, they are also
under pres-
sure from their editors to feature such ‘breaking news’ in their
stories,
especially attention- grabbing issues, to maximize audience
share. Thus
Trump was able to set the agenda by tweeting positions that
were guar-
anteed a wide audience in mainstream media.
Hamby criticizes the dominance of Twitter, especially the way
it
contributes to the greater prominence of trivia or focuses on the
pro-
cess of campaigns rather than the substance. He notes that this
is not a
new criticism, but the trend is intensified by Twitter since
messages are
unfiltered – or, put the other way around, there is less editorial
control –
which allows minor incidents to gain widespread attention
quickly. Here
it can be noted that Trump’s tweets also went against the grain
of the
tighter management of campaign messages on social media,
which has
been characteristic of other presidential campaigns (see Kreiss
2016).
2020 08:20:55 UTC

http://viz2016.com/
http://viz2016.com/
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016
_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html
o p u l i S M 65
He tweeted himself (and still does so!), and the controversial
nature of
many of his messages means they are a boon to news- starved
journalists.
Hamby describes how there is often a desperate search to find
something
newsworthy to report among journalists during the primary
campaign,
and Trump often provided tweets (and again, still does) that
were con-
sidered newsworthy enough to be reproduced in full in
the news.
Trump’s position could not have been achieved without the sup-
port of a substantial proportion of the electorate. His base of
support
consisted of a part of the population that considers itself left out
by the
country’s media elites and its established party elites.2 And
while there
is an economic aspect to the demographic of this support, it is
among

the less educated, male, more rural, white population. Trump
supporters
are against established state elites and share a distrust of
government,
a deep- rooted tradition in American politics (Hall and
Lindholm 2001).
Their anti- immigrant, anti- refugee and anti- Muslim stances
are more to
do with citizenship rights and economic nationalism than purely
eco-
nomic disadvantage or uncertainty.
As we have seen, unlike elections elsewhere (such as in
Sweden –
Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2011), the focus during American
elections
in the media is on the horse race between candidates, who rely
on per-
sonal media attention (as opposed to attention on parties and
policies),
within a media system where news is driven more strongly (and
almost
exclusively, unlike Sweden, with its public- service media) by
market
competition for audiences. The role of Twitter can be singled
out here; it
was a transmission belt to visibility in traditional media. It did
not play a
decisive role once Trump was the nominee of the Republican
Party since,
from that point onwards, the candidates of both parties were
guaranteed
a roughly equal share of media attention (and Trump could also
gain
attention by seeking media appearances). But Twitter did play a
decisive

role in his success in becoming the nominee for the Republican
Party
and, for a crucial period, he was able to circumvent media
autonomy – or
use digital media to amplify his message in traditional media.
This success cannot be explained by reference to Twitter alone;
rather, again, the explanation relies on how Trump’s political
message –
his unconventional remarks on Twitter – received a level of
attention in
traditional media that would have been impossible had he relied
on press
conferences or traditional broadcast coverage. In other words,
by com-
municating via Twitter, Trump was able to bypass the
conventional gate-
keepers of journalists and mainstream TV and newspapers
because they
were compelled to report his views in a competitive
environment that
relies on audience share. Put differently, Trump did not directly
speak to
2020 08:20:55 UTC
his audience via Twitter – too few Americans are on Twitter.

But he could
rely on traditional media to broadcast his new media messages.
As Karpf
(2016) argues: ‘In a world with digital media, but less analytics,
this elec-
tion drama would have unfolded differently . . . journalists and
their edi-
tors would have been less attuned to the immediate feedback of
Trump’s
daily ratings effects, and this would have led them to spread
their cover-
age more evenly (as they always have in the past). Trump’s
media domi-
nance isn’t just driven by our attention, it’s driven by the media
industry’s
new tools for measuring and responding to that attention.’ As
we will
see in chapter 6, these analytics have become important beyond
politics
and elections and now also shape the competition for online
audiences
generally.
In any event, the role of the media and of Twitter was decisive
inasmuch as other factors that typically play a role can be ruled
out: the
argument that the party and its elites ‘decide’ on the candidate
(Cohen
et al. 2016) did not apply on this occasion (though arguably, it
applied
to Hillary Clinton’s nomination). Second, Trump had fewer
resources; he
spent far less than other candidates during the primary
campaign (and
he also spent less, and there was less overall spending, than in
previous

campaigns). Third, Trump did not have an effective data
analytics- driven
or ground campaign; in this respect, his campaign was less
sophisticated
than that of his competitors.
Populists have traditionally been adept at using the mass media
of
their day. But the reach of their media was limited, as with
direct mail and
magazines or latterly email (Kazin 1998, 259– 60), unless
populists could
also obtain sufficient attention in the mainstream media. Other
populists
have had a critical attitude to the mainstream media, and Trump
has
also maintained a critical – even conspiratorial – attitude
towards the
establishment- dominated media throughout the election (and
beyond)
and accused the media of being ‘rigged’ against him. The extent
to which
this attitude drove his supporters to alternative media and social
media
has not been systematically examined (to my knowledge). But
the key
is that Trump was able to continue to have his message relayed
from his
tweets to the mainstream media, even though the mainstream
media
often covered him negatively (and covered his claims that the
media
were biased against him).
Trump stands in a long line of right- and left- wing populism in
America, though as Kazin (1998) points out, populism has

generally
moved rightwards since the Second World War. Populism as an
ideol-
ogy has waxed and waned in the post- war period, though it has
often
been just as strong as left, right, moderate and libertarian
ideologies
2020 08:20:55 UTC
o p u l i S M 67
(Claggett et al. 2014). Trump’s language was strongly populist;
only
Bernie Sanders rivalled him on the left and Ben Carson on the
right for
populist language, as Oliver and Rahn (2016) show. They also
show
that support for his views was strong among voters, and argue
that such
populist views have not been taken into account by parties, and
by the
Republican Party in particular, which they say constitutes a
‘representa-
tion gap’: ‘Donald Trump’s simple, Manichean rhetoric is
quintessentially
populist . . . the opportunity for a Donald Trump presidency is
ultimately
rooted in a failure of the Republican Party to incorporate a wide
range of

constituencies’ (2016, 202). In other words, his populist appeal
mattered
too. In short, Twitter, translated into mainstream media, plus
populism,
explains Trump’s success.
3.2 The Sweden Democrats’ alternative media
The Sweden Democrats are a populist anti- immigration right-
wing party
that has risen to prominence in the past decade, though their
popular-
ity pre- dates the recent migrant crisis (the party was founded in
1988).
Indeed, their roots lie partly in a neo- Nazi movement that has
been on
the fringes of Swedish politics since the 1960s or earlier,
though as the
Sweden Democrats have gained electoral support, they have had
to dis-
tance themselves ever more from this association to appear
respectable
(Baas 2014). Another predecessor of the Sweden Democrats
were the
New Democrats, a right- wing challenger party sparked by an
anti- statist
tax revolt of the early 1990s, but whose support quickly petered
out.
Sweden Democrats, in contrast, have gained strength in the
recent elec-
tions, particularly as immigration and refugees have become an
increas-
ingly salient issue. They are also Eurosceptic and see Islamic
terrorism
and Islamic values among immigrants as a threat. Yet they were
ignored

by other parties and by the mainstream media until they entered
parlia-
ment in 2010 (Hellström et al. 2012; see also Strömbäck
et al. 2016).
The populism of the Sweden Democrats is part of a broader
fam-
ily of right- wing populist parties and movements in the Nordic
coun-
tries (Lindroth 2016). A comparison is often made with the
Folkeparti
(People’s Party) in Denmark, which has formed a part of
coalition gov-
ernments. In Sweden, in contrast, the strategy of the other major
parties
has been to place a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around the Sweden
Democrats, in
this way keeping them out of government. The political
effectiveness of
this strategy can be put to one side here. But while outside of
the main-
stream, the Sweden Democrats have also attempted to claim to
represent
2020 08:20:55 UTC
the left- wing tradition that has dominated Swedish politics, the

ideal of
a ‘people’s home’ or ‘folkhem’. This social- democratic ideal
aims to cre-
ate a welfare state for all Swedes. The populist agenda here can
thus be
described as welfare chauvinism, restricting the benefits of
citizenship
rights, and especially social citizenship, of the ‘folkhem’ to the
‘true peo-
ple’, and in this sense can be described as right wing.
Sweden Democrats have been blocked from having influence in
the government. The so- called ‘December Agreement’ after the
2014
election kept the Sweden Democrats from playing the
kingmaker role,
which their share of parliamentary representation could have
afforded
them since neither the left nor the right bloc of parties achieved
a
majority. This agreement has enabled the left coalition to rule
with the
support of a right- wing bloc of conservative and liberal
(‘borgerlig’)
parties. Subsequently, however, the parties from this
conservative bloc
have entertained the possibility of allying themselves with the
Sweden
Democrats, so that this agreement and the ‘cordon sanitaire’
could
unravel. During the summer of 2016, the government also made
immi-
gration laws more restrictive, no longer allowing family
reunification for
refugees and immigrants (which had been one of the Sweden
Democrats’

demands). Whether partly adopting the Sweden Democrats’ core
agenda
in this way, or making common ground with them, dampens
their popu-
list support, remains to be seen.
The electoral support of the Sweden Democrats has come
mainly at
the expense of the Conservative party (Moderaterna), which has
tradi-
tionally favoured a pro- immigration stance for humanitarian
and labour
policy reasons. This has meant that the Sweden Democrats,
claiming to
protect Swedish values in contrast to such ‘openness’, could
gain sup-
port among right- wing voters. They have also presented
themselves as
martyrs and paint the media as being biased against them
(Schall 2016,
181), just as Trump has done in America. And, like Trump
supporters,
they are less educated, more rural and male. As they have also
received
mostly negative coverage in the mainstream media, a raft of
alternative
media have sprung up in support of the Sweden Democrats, self-
defined
as ‘alternative’ to the mainstream media.
These alternative media consist of online newspapers, but the
Sweden Democrats have also made extensive use of social
media.
Larsson found, during the 2014 election, a ‘tendency for
ideologically
marginalized parties to gain more traction in novel media

spheres than
in the coverage curated by established media actors’ (2015, 12),
which
also benefited other smaller parties such as the Feminist
Initiative and
the Pirate Party. However, unlike these two parties, by 2014 the
Sweden
2020 08:20:55 UTC
o p u l i S M 69
Democrats were no longer marginal, and had gained the third-
largest
share of votes (they had already passed the 5 per cent threshold
of votes
to gain seats in Parliament in 2010, unlike the other two). Polls
since the
election have put them at around 20 per cent (for example,
Sannerstedt
2016). And the public’s distrust of mainstream media on
immigra-
tion has been high; among Sweden Democrat supporters it stood
at
93 per cent, whereas it was 60 per cent among the general
population
(Rydgren and van der Meiden 2016, 22).3 At the same time,
attitudes
towards immigrants and refugees have generally become more
…

From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts,
Pablo Barberá
Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 4, October 2017,
pp. 46-59 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher
during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0064
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671987
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0064
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671987
From Liberation to turmoiL:
SociaL media and democracy
Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts,
and Pablo Barberá
Joshua A. Tucker is professor of politics and a cofounder and
codi-
rector of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP)
labo-

ratory at New York University. Yannis Theocharis is a research
fel-
low at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research
(MZES).
Margaret E. Roberts is assistant professor of political science at
the University of California, San Diego. Pablo Barberá is
assistant
professor in the School of International Relations at the
University
of Southern California. All the authors contributed equally, and
are
listed in reverse alphabetical order. A portion of this essay
draws on
ideas in Roberts’s forthcoming book Censored: Distraction and
Diver-
sion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press).
In 2010, Time magazine chose Mark Zuckerberg as its annual
“Person
of the Year.” He had, said the newsweekly, turned “the lonely,
antisocial
world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous
world”
through his vastly popular social-media platform Facebook.1 A
year
later, Zuckerberg’s portrait in Time was replaced as Person of
the Year
by that of “the protester.” This figure represented those who had
voiced
dissent—often by organizing on Facebook or Twitter—against
authori-
tarian rulers in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and
Yemen, as
well as those who had taken to the streets for months against
unemploy-
ment, austerity, and inequality in, among other democratic

countries,
Greece, Spain, and the United States.
Fast forward six years, and Time’s Person of the Year was the
sitting
president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The president
respond-
ed to the announcement through his favorite communications
channel,
Twitter: “Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for
naming
me ‘Person of the Year’—a great honor!”2 Twitter was an
especially
appropriate medium for his response, given the outsized role
that social
media were reputed to have played in the 2016 U.S. election.
Indeed,
the importance of social media in that election has grown to the
point
Journal of Democracy Volume 28, Number 4 October 2017
© 2017 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins
University Press
47Joshua A. Tucker, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret E. Roberts,
and Pablo Barberá
that a special counsel has been appointed and has put together a
team
“stacked with prosecutors and FBI agents well equipped to
investigate
the Moscow-connected Twitter bots and Facebook trolls that
churned
out campaign-related headlines boosting Trump’s candidacy.”3

In other
words, in only five years social media have gone—in the
popular imagi-
nation at least—from being a way for prodemocratic forces to
fight au-
tocrats to being a tool of outside actors who want to attack
democracies.
Social-media technology is young, but has already played a part
in
numerous turbulent protests and a highly polarized U.S.
election. Social
media have often been described as the site for conflict between
“good”
democratic forces who use social media to make their voices
heard and
“bad’’ autocratic and repressive forces who aim to censor this
channel to
silence these liberal elements. However, recent worries that
illiberal and
extremist forces might use the freewheeling world of online
communi-
cations to undermine democracy reversed the discussion about
social
media. After the 2016 U.S. election, even leaders of
democracies called
for greater “regulation” of the internet. In this, they echoed—to
a degree
at least—authoritarian rhetoric that promotes censorship and
“public-
opinion guidance.”4
Is there a theoretical framework linking social media and
politics that
can shed light on these turnabouts and contradictions? We think
that

there is. Let us begin with two simple observations. First, social
media
give a voice to those whose views are normally excluded from
political
discussions in the mainstream media. With social media, people
can find
like-minded compatriots, organize protests and movements, and
support
political candidates and parties. In short, social media solve
collective-
action problems that have long bedeviled those traditionally
shut out of
mainstream politics. This can include prodemocratic forces, of
course.
Social media can give them new means of holding governments
ac-
countable and pressing for wider political inclusion; hence the
early and
hopeful talk about “liberation technology” as a feature of the
digital age.
Yet social media can obviously amplify other and more extreme
voices
as well, including those which, from the point of view of liberal
democ-
racy, are “antisystem.”
Second, and counterintuitively, the very openness of the social-
media
environment can be used to foster censorship: The platforms of
infor-
mation freedom can be exploited in order to silence others. To
date,
these activities have been most visible in the responses of
nondemo-
cratic regimes to antiregime activity online. Authoritarian
censors now

know how to wield online harassment, propaganda, distraction,
and
denial-of-service attacks to muzzle critics and shut down or
distort the
information space. To complicate matters, illiberal, antisystem
forces
within democratic regimes have learned how to use these
authoritarian
methods for exploiting open information platforms. Thus social-
media
strategies pioneered by nondemocracies for authoritarian ends
are now
48 Journal of Democracy
affecting political life in the world’s democracies. The question
of how
democracies should react to this new, technologically generated
chal-
lenge remains unresolved.
This double reality of the open online world—able to give a
voice
to the voiceless, but also bendable toward the aims of
censorship and
exclusion—explains why thoughts about social media can run
either to
optimism or (as has been more the case recently) to pessimism
when
it comes to the implications for democracy.5 The heart of the
matter is
that, while freedom of information online is an inherently
democratic
principle, social media are neither inherently democratic nor

inherently
undemocratic. Rather, social media constitute a space in which
politi-
cal interests battle for influence, and not all these interests are
liberal or
democratic.
This simple theoretical framework explains how social media
can be
at once a technology of liberation, a technology useful to
authoritarian
governments bent on stifling dissent, and a technology for
empowering
those seeking to challenge the status quo in democratic
societies—in-
cluding previously marginalized extremist groups. Two caveats
are in
order, however. First, while we think that there has been a
historical
evolution of the use of social media—democrats harnessed
social media
to oppose authoritarianism; authoritarian regimes responded by
raising
their own “online game”; then antisystem forces in democracies
started
copying the new authoritarian methods—this sequence is for
now best
treated as a hypothesis for testing rather than as a proven fact.
Second,
although we focus on the ways in which social media have
given voice
to democratic actors in nondemocratic systems and antisystem
actors
in democratic systems, our overall claim is that social media
have giv-
en voice to marginalized groups. This can also include groups

that run
with, rather than against, the grain of the regime; in other
words, social
media can also be useful to prodemocratic voices in
democracies and
antidemocratic voices in autocracies.
A New Hope: Liberation Technology
Social media have transformed the way we communicate,
interact, and
consume many kinds of information, including political
information. In
technological jargon, social media form a set of interactive Web
2.0 ap-
plications that enable the creation and distribution of user-
generated con-
tent (such as text, photos, and videos) instantly and across vast
networks
of users. Unlike previous computer-mediated technologies,
social media
enable users to become active producers of content (rather than
merely
consumers), while articulating and making visible their
connections with
other individuals with whom they interact and collaborate.
Social media
have changed the structure of communication by allowing
individual us-
ers to broadcast information. This creates a “many-to-many’’
structure of
and Pablo Barberá

communication that differs from the traditional “one-to-many”
structure,
which allows only a few users (various elites, traditional media)
to broad-
cast to the wider public. This many-to-many structure allows for
coordi-
nation among individuals and for messages or content sent
through such
platforms to go “viral”—that is, to be spread horizontally across
peer-to-
peer networks almost in real time.6
These new features highlight what makes social media such a
potent
political tool both within and beyond the ambit of institutions.
First, about
two-billion people, or more than a quarter of the world’s
population, take
part in social media. Across societies, social media are quickly
becoming
the primary source from which people get their information.
According
to data from the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of U.S. adults
now get
their news via social media, while the 2016 Reuters Institute
Digital News
Report shows that 46 percent of Europeans use social media for
news.7
Further, there is some evidence that social media can produce a
better-
informed public and increase exposure to cross-cutting political
views.8
When unrest challenges nondemocratic regimes, social media’s
abil-

ity to convey information shines. International journalists,
people “on
the ground,” influential regional and global actors, and general
readers
can all connect over social media. The Arab Spring is an oft-
cited ex-
ample of how social media can catapult the marginalized to
national and
international prominence overnight. During Iran’s 2009 Green
Wave
movement, social media provided street-level protesters with
commu-
nications and brought the Islamic Republic’s abuses of power to
the
attention of international media despite heavy censorship and a
regime
crackdown on the internet. Social media linked cheated voters,
disaf-
fected young people, and beaten protesters, creating serious
problems
for the regime.9
The many-to-many nature of social media makes it possible to
coor-
dinate collective action in ways that enhance participation in
democratic
societies, sometimes even in the absence of formal
organizations. Per-
sonal stories and symbols spread via social media can be potent
mobiliz-
ers. Empirical research on Facebook’s mobilization effects
during elec-
tions has shown that the appearance of messages on users’ news
feeds
can directly influence political self-expression, information-
seeking,

and voting behavior.10 Studies of the Indignados movement in
Spain
found that, even aside from influential users and their
information cas-
cades, the sheer numbers of grassroots and common users
involved in
low-cost social-media activism can give them wide audience
reach.11
Relatedly, by making available new and expressive forms for
participa-
tion in the political process, social media have become
important for
facilitating the diffusion of messages from highly committed
groups of
users across networks and toward less invested peripheral
participants
who help to increase the magnitude of online mobilization by
way of
mini-participation.12 This in turn can lead to an increase in
public and
media attention—as exemplified by the emergence of the Tea
Party and
Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the possibility for
offline mo-
bilization, exemplified by the Arab Spring protests, Occupy
Wall Street,
and Spain’s 15M.
Thus social media have the potential to aid democratic
movements
by spreading information, reinvigorating participation, and

facilitating
collective action. In a nutshell, social media can democratize
access to
information and communication tools. Groups that would
ordinarily be
censored or silenced can reach a mass public and find it easier
to hold
powerful elites accountable.
As social media’s potential advantages and benefits for those
seek-
ing to further democracy become more evident, however, so do
social
media’s weaknesses. Although these platforms clearly enable
disparate
and previously unconnected individuals to organize sudden
protests, it
is not so clear that they can put sustained pressure on elites, an
essential
requirement not only for the process of democracy-building, but
also
for keeping a given issue on the agenda. The difference between
these
outcomes, moreover, may be precisely the hierarchical
organizations
that social media are so good at obviating. Without such
organizations,
internet-enabled democratic activism can turn out to be a flash
in the
pan, giving off some heat and light but quickly burning out and
having
no lasting effect. However, this is likely also the case because
autocratic
governments, too, can harness the internet to deactivate the
potential for
long-term change. We turn to this perspective next.

The Empire Strikes Back: Repression Technology
Resistance to social media’s democratic potential has always
been
inevitable. Governments threatened by efforts to hold them
more ac-
countable would look for ways to push back. As some pointed
out early
on, autocratic regimes quickly adapted to limit the impact of
this new
technology.13 Many of the tools that they use for this purpose
are famil-
iar censorship strategies—devised long ago offline, but now
deployed
online—that are meant to silence opposition to authoritarianism.
Others,
however, are new and specific to the world of social media.
These in-
clude tactics designed to exploit the many-to-many nature of the
internet
in ways that amplify the regime’s messages while muffling the
opposi-
tion’s. All the tools, old and new, can be sorted into three
categories
that Margaret Roberts, in her forthcoming book, calls “the three
Fs”:
There is fear, which is the force behind censorship that deters.
There is
friction, which is censorship that delays. And there is flooding,
which is
censorship that distracts or confuses.14
First, autocrats can aim to limit online activism by intimidating
and
jailing (or worse) those who use online platforms for dissent

and opposi-
tion. “Fear” tactics are part of the autocrat’s traditional toolbox,
meant
and Pablo Barberá
to make those inclined to speak out keep silent instead.
According to the
Committee to Protect Journalists, 259 journalists were in jail
around the
world as of December 2016.15 Many of these journalists have
published
stories online dealing with matters such as inequality, protests,
and cor-
ruption—all “forbidden topics” in the eyes of powerholders who
do not
want to be held accountable. Examples also abound of
governments
targeting ordinary citizens who have used online platforms to
spread
information that governments do not want disclosed. Although
there is
no formal tally of how many bloggers are behind bars, a Google
News
search for “blogger arrested” yields thousands of hits. In the
hands of
states, the digital tracking power of the internet has made
regime foes
easy to identify and apprehend.
Even allowing for all this, however, the internet has so
dramatically
expanded the numbers and types of people who take part in the

public
sphere that traditional forms of repression are becoming too
costly for
authoritarian regimes to bear. Only in some totalitarian regimes
can all
or nearly all the people be held in fear; in most autocracies,
omnipresent
fear can create backlash as well as problems for information
collection
and innovation.16 Therefore, autocrats have created quieter
“friction”
tactics to use against the internet. These include sophisticated
block-
ing systems such as the infamous “Great Firewall of China,”
internet
slowdowns and shutdowns, surgical removal of social-media
posts, and
algorithmic manipulations of search results to suppress
information that
autocrats dislike. In many cases, social-media users may not
even real-
ize that they are being affected by such censorship, making it
all but
impossible to avoid or counter.17
While autocrats can use repression technology to undermine
freedom
of information online, these same regimes can also twist the
free and
open nature of social media to their own advantage. The battle
for the
social-media space goes to those who can push their information
to the
top of the pile. Recognizing this, authoritarian regimes have
harnessed
the ability of anyone to post on social-media platforms in order

to pro-
mote regime agendas and drown out those of regime opponents.
This is
“flooding.”
For example, authoritarian governments can pay posters to
spread
strategically timed messages on social media. They can also use
au-
tomated bots weaponized to promote government propaganda or
flood
antiregime protest hashtags. These human or automated online
armies
may promote regime propaganda, or they may disrupt the
opposition by
creating distractions. They may also spread misinformation to
confuse
people and degrade the usefulness of online information, or they
may
harass regime opponents online.18
Government-coordinated online campaigns to push propaganda
or
silence critics are simultaneously forms of participation and
censor-
ship. The internet’s open nature allowed regime opponents—
shut out of
mainstream, state-run media—to publicize their views and
organize for
political action. Authoritarian governments, however, then try
to coun-

ter them by organizing mass online campaigns of their own.
That some-
thing as quintessentially liberal as the internet’s very openness
can be
used in efforts to censor and to promote illiberal values is a
quandary for
scholars and policy makers alike. Like the dangers that
“clickbait farms”
pose to search engines and that fake reviews pose to online
reviewing
systems, the strategic introduction of pseudonymous political
informa-
tion threatens social media’s already fragile status as an arena
for true
public deliberation. The trick of “flooding the (social-media)
zone” as
a form of censorship is therefore a particularly powerful
political tool,
and it can be more widely harnessed than just by state actors
attempting
to undermine broad political participation and discussion in
their own
countries.
Return of the Antisystem Forces: Tumultuous Technology
As we have seen, the same infrastructure that can empower
demo-
cratic opposition can also be used for authoritarian purposes.
The tac-
tics pioneered by authoritarian regimes, however, are also
available to
groups that operate within democratic societies to pursue
illiberal aims.
The same mechanism that played such a huge role in the Arab
Spring—

social media’s ability to give voice to the voiceless—is now
empower-
ing groups on the margins to challenge core democratic values.
Perhaps
the clearest example of this is the manner in which terrorist
groups such
as ISIS have turned social media into their main communication
chan-
nel—to recruit foreign fighters, to coordinate attacks, and to
amplify
their activities by instantly reaching vast international
audiences.19
But this trend is not limited to external groups. As Alice
Marwick
and Rebecca Lewis note, “while trolls, white nationalists, men’s
rights
activists, gamergaters, the ‘alt-right,’ and conspiracy theorists
may di-
verge deeply in their beliefs, they share tactics and converge on
com-
mon issues.”20 There are many reasons, of course, for the
recent increase
in visibility of these groups, yet the rise of social media has
undoubt-
edly made it easier for people who hold minority views within
their
own communities to find like-minded others in other locations
and form
larger communities than would have been possible before the
digital era.
At the same time, as journalists and traditional media outlets
see their
gate-keeping and fact-checking roles diminish, more
controversial ideas

can go unchallenged; they can be bolstered by the algorithmic
features
of online platforms that incentivize clickbait headlines and
emotional
messages, and then propagate widely with the help of paid trolls
and
bots to reach larger segments of the populace. In this way,
antisystem
actors in democracies can not only draw on the lessons learned
by those
who originally harnessed social media on behalf of
prodemocratic move-
and Pablo Barberá
ments in more authoritarian countries, but can also use the very
tools
(such as trolls and bots) developed by authoritarian regimes to
coun-
ter democracy movements. Indeed, as some have suggested,
antisystem
movements in democracies may literally be using the tools—
such as
bot-nets—that authoritarian regimes developed to combat their
own on-
line foes.21 This new situation may very well have caught
democratic
political systems off guard in much the same way that social
media sur-
prised nondemocratic regimes earlier in the decade.
As noted, social media can lend a voice to anyone whose
attitudes and

beliefs may traditionally have been considered too far outside
the main-
stream. This can include antisystem forces that actively seek to
undermine
liberal democracy, but also political groups whose aim is to
transform
democratic politics to reduce economic and political inequality.
Although
not all these groups express outright hostility to liberal
democracy, a com-
mon thread is their eagerness to raise the profile of policy
preferences that
previously had been found unacceptable or otherwise unworthy
of atten-
tion by mainstream politicians, parties, and media organs.
The emergence so close together in time of populist parties of
the right
and left in Europe, of Donald Trump’s electorally successful
anti-immi-
grant and protectionist platform in the United States, and of
movements
to protest socioeconomic inequality (such as Occupy Wall Street
in the
United States or the Indignados movement in Spain) underlines
the grow-
ing importance of social media in democratic systems. To be
clear, we are
not saying that social media can explain the recent rise of
populism. Yet
populists have clearly found online platforms helpful as their
once-margin-
alized voices have gained volume under the new rules of the
digital age.
These rules are transforming democratic politics in two
important ways.

First, campaigns and movements of this new type have learned
not
only from their own patterns of use across the years, but
especially from
the diffusion and mobilization practices of election campaigns
in de-
mocracies. In the United States, pioneering social-media
campaigns by
Democratic Party politicians such as Howard Dean and Barack
Obama
had a massive impact on how information and communication
technolo-
gies have been deployed in order to win over the public.22 At
least since
Obama’s win in 2008, actors both inside and outside the
electoral arena
have taken note of innovative political uses of social media, and
learned
to reinvent their methods of approaching the public. What was
once the
province of mainly young and technologically literate
politicians has now
gone mainstream, and an entirely new political battlespace has
opened.
A second way in which social media allow challengers to the
status
quo to profit from new rules is the terseness that dominates
social-
media exchanges. Twitter, with its 140-character limit per
tweet, is
not only poorly suited to fostering nuanced discussion, but also
can be
used to undermine basic tenets of the democratic public
sphere.23 On-

line trolls are usually not interested in argument-based
conversation:
Their goal is to trigger a cascade of harassment that can silence
or de-
mobilize other individuals or public officials, or to create
distractions
that refocus online users on another issue or message. Social
media
have been elevated as powerful tools in the hands of populist
candi-
dates and parties precisely because social media allow them to
create
spectacle rapidly, while simultaneously avoiding discussions
that they
might appear to “lose.” Why even engage in a discussion when
you can
get all the exposure you need through a provocative statement?
Far-right parties in Europe provide excellent examples of this
trend.
The founder of the German anti-immigrant movement Pegida
(the word is
a German acronym that stands for Patriotic Europeans Against
the Islam-
ization of the West) appeared to resign from his leadership
position after
an alleged image of him posing as Hitler was released, yet he
was rein-
stated shortly after.24 Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has
routinely
used Twitter to cause outrage by calling his leftist rivals

“Islamofascists,”
tweeted a month before the March 2017 election a photoshopped
image
of the parliamentary leader of an opposing party, showing him
at a rally
with Muslim protesters holding up banners with messages such
as “Islam
will conquer Europe” and “Shariah for The Netherlands.”25
While Dutch
politicians across the spectrum condemned Wilders for this, it
kept the
news spotlight on him for several days during a very critical
time of the
election, in which his party went on to finish second.
While the uses of social media by antisystem groups in
democracies
are diverse and cannot be captured here in their entirety, many
rely on
the same mechanisms that democratic groups and repressive
regimes
alike use to harness social media’s power. For example, the
prolifera-
tion of misinformation across social media follows the same
cross-net-
work and cross-platform diffusion logic that enabled protesters
in Egypt
to turn their personal and emotional stories of beating and
repression
into the gunpowder of revolution. Precisely because social-
media posts
spread through weak ties and are presented in the context of
powerful
social cues, “fake news” can travel rapidly across social
networks with-
out being challenged. Similarly, attention-hacking techniques

that au-
thoritarian regimes have used, such as clickbait and manipulated
search
results, benefit immensely from rapid diffusion. This process
may gain
strength from users’ accidental (as opposed to selective)
exposure to
content shared via social media. Such content, even if it is out
of line
with users’ beliefs, will in at least some cases rouse their
curiosity when
otherwise they might never have looked into the topic.
The Law Awakens: Restricting Technology?
Much as liberation technology created problems for autocracies,
the
success of social media has fueled political turmoil in
democracies.
Some of this turmoil belongs to the sharp but normal cut-and-
thrust
and Pablo Barberá
of freewheeling debate in democratic societies. Some, however,
falls
within the ambit of extremism, even violent extremism. Can or
should
democratic governments do anything about this, and if so, what?
After
the 3 June 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack—it killed eleven
(in-
cluding the three attackers), injured 48, and was the third such

high-
profile assault in the United Kingdom since March—Home
Secretary
Amber Rudd attributed the attack to “radical Islamist
terrorists.”26 The
same day, Prime Minister Theresa May called for closer
regulation of
the internet in order to “prevent the spread of extremism and
terrorism
planning.”27 A few weeks later, looking ahead to the Bundestag
election
set for September 2017, the German government passed a law
decreeing
heavy fines for social-media companies that fail to remove
within 24
hours racist or slanderous (in the words of Justice Minister
Heiko Maas,
“obviously illegal”) comments and posts.28
These decisions may test the limits of freedom of expression in
dem-
ocratic societies and put forcefully on display an enduring
structural
asymmetry between democratic and nondemocratic regimes.
While au-
thoritarian regimes …
A NEW FRONTIER
DISINFORMATION AND
PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW
IN THE CONTEXT OF

ELECTION
OBSERVATION
by Michael Meyer-Resende
Democracy Reporting International (DRI) operates on the
conviction that democratic,
participatory governance is a human right and governments
should be accountable to
their citizens. DRI supports democratic governance around the
world with a focus on
institutions of democracy, such as constitutions, elections,
parliaments and rules of
democracy grounded in international law. Through careful
assessments based on field
research with partners, DRI convenes diverse stakeholders to
promote policies that
strengthen democratic institutions. A non-profit company, DRI
is based in Berlin and has
o!ces in Tunisia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and
Myanmar.
Michael Meyer-Resende is a lawyer with twenty years of
experience in political
transitions and democratisation. Works in Europe, the Middle
East, Africa and Asia. His
professional experience includes two years legal practice in
Berlin, four years with the
O!ce for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of
the OSCE (Warsaw),
three years with the election team of the European Commission
in Brussels and
journalistic experience with the BBC. In 2006 he co-founded
DRI and serves as Executive

Director since then. He publishes it regularly in newspapers like
The New York Times,
The Guardian, Politico, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
think tank publications.
This publication was produced with the financial support of the
European Union.
Its contents are the sole responsibility of Michael Meyer-
Resende and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the European Union.
Graphic and layout design: Giorgio Grasso for Democracy
Essentials
Cover photo: Ezequiel Scagnetti
Interior photos: Victor Idrogo (pp. 3, 6-7, 17); Ezequiel
Scagnetti (p. 22)
CREDITS
3
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
I. SUMMARY
II. BACKGROUND
AND NATIONAL LAWS
VI. EXAMPLES OF OBSERVING

IN ELECTIONS
V. MONITORING SOCIAL MEDIA:
THE TECHNICAL SIDE
VI. CONCLUSIONS
p. 5
p. 8
p. 11
p. 18
p. 20
p. 23
5
Social media and networks (henceforth ‘soci-
al media’) have become an essential space of
public and semi-public discourse. They have
shown their democratising potential by increa-
sing access to information and greatly lowering
the barrier of participation in public debates,
however, the last few years have also shown
some of the risks that are present in social
media. The low barriers to participation have
been used by various state and not-state actors
attempting to undermine electoral integrity by
spreading disinformation, intimidating stake-
holders and suppressing free speech.

The social media sphere is managed by a hand-
ful of big companies, which have only belatedly
woken up to the challenge and started to tight-
en user policies and to give more attention to
paid or unpaid content on their services. Of-
ten, they frame the problem in biological terms
(“healthy debate”) or vague terms like “positi-
ve” discourse, rather than acknowledging that
discourse is a social interaction for which a
rights-based approach is appropriate, which can
draw on an already agreed framework and inter-
national legal obligations."
The human rights discourse related to social
media has been mostly focused on one right,
freedom of expression, with many observers
rightly concerned about attempts to stifle free
speech on the internet. Additionally, there has
been concern over civil rights, in particular the
right to privacy. Where social media companies
have committed themselves to uphold human
rights, e.g. the Global Network Initiative, they
have focused on these two rights.
Another aspect of human rights protection has
hardly figured in the public debate or company
initiatives such as the Global Network Initiative:
the right to political participation (article 25 In-
ternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
ICCPR). This right is not only concerned with
the"expression"of opinions, but also with their"for-
mation. This is an agreed concern in Europe as
can be seen for example by the existence of pub-
lic broadcasting in all EU member states."Opinion
formation is a crucial part of a “genuine” election

(as is specified in ICCPR article 25).
According to the UN’s Human Rights Committee
the right to vote in elections implies that “voters
SUMMARYI. SUMMARY
should be able to form opinions independently,
free of violence or threat of violence, compulsion,
inducement or manipulative interference of any
kind” (General Comment 25). These are exactly
the concerns raised about speech on social me-
dia: threats of violence, hate speech, manipulati-
ve interference for example through social bots
or through trolls. However, there has been little
debate on how these issues could be addressed in
the framework of human rights."
While private companies, like social media plat-
forms, are not directly bound by international
human rights obligations like the ICCPR, states
are expected to enforce human rights obligati-
ons also against private parties. In addition to
this indirect e#ect of human rights, the soci-
al media companies are also directly bound by
commitments they have made in various con-
texts, such as the Global Network Initiative or
obligations emanating from the" agreements on
business and human rights.
As the formation of opinion is part of interna-
tional human rights obligations, the role of so-
cial media is a legitimate aspect of international
election observation. Furthermore, there is mas-

sive public interest in the issue; if international
election observation does not address the role
of social media, it risks missing an important
element of the process and thereby relevance.
While systematic research is still at the begin-
ning, there is no doubt that social media have an
impact in forming opinions.
Currently election observers are set-up to detect
traditional manipulations, say ballot box stu!ng
or a dominance of the ruling party in the public
media, but they are not set up to monitor, un-
derstand and report on a serious disinformati-
on attempt. It is not a far-fetched scenario that
an election with tight competition, where one
percent can make the di#erence, will be hit by
a major disinformation attack. Russian actors
already tried to do so in the French Presiden-
tial elections. Traditional election observation
would have little to say in that situation. Already,
traditional election observation had little to say
on the biggest controversy around the 2016 US
elections, namely manipulative interference on
social media.
There are three major challenges in observing
social media. First, the obligation to allow opi-
nions to form free of threats and manipulation
is potentially large and not yet well-defined. Se-
cond, the space to be observed, interactions on
social media, is also huge. Observers would need
to know with some precision what to look for.
Any social media information posted somewhe-

re, on any channel, at any time could potentially
influence voters.
Third, the technical possibilities to retrieve
large data from social media networks have been
narrowing. Facebook, in particular, has become
much more restrictive in the wake of the Cam-
bridge Analytica scandal; it is not currently pos-
sible to retrieve structured data from Facebook
in a manner that is compliant with their Terms
of Service. However, some social media listen-
ing agencies do still have access to such data,
and researchers can still use web scraping to re-
trieve data. But even if huge amounts of structu-
red data could be retrieved, analysing this data
requires specific technical skills, which creates
its own limitations. Furthermore, a lot of soci-
al media interaction is moving into closed chat
groups, which cannot be monitored by interna-
tional observers.
8
Why Social Media Matter in Elections
Four billion people, more than half of the world’s
population, uses the internet and three billion
use social media regularly. Internet penetration
varies widely country-by-country1 and so does
news consumption through social media.2
Concerns about the role of social media in elec-
tions have multiplied in the last years, triggered
in particular by Russian interference in the US

2016 elections. The problem appears to spread.
The Oxford Internet Institute notes:
“The number of countries where for-
mally organised social media manipula-
tion occurs has greatly increased, from
28 to 48 countries globally. The majority
of growth comes from political parties
who spread disinformation and junk
news around election periods. There are
1 Data from the Global Digital Report 2018 by We are
Social and Hootsuite. As both are companies offering social
media related services, the data should be seen with some
caution. They can be downloaded here: https://wearesocial.
com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018
2 Reuters Digital News Report 2018.
more political parties learning from the
strategies deployed during Brexit and
the US 2016 Presidential election: more
campaigns are using bots, junk news,
and disinformation to polarise and ma-
nipulate voters.”3
Research is only at the beginning and it cannot
be determined with certainty how influential so-
cial media are in forming opinions. The answer
will di#er from country to country and from
constituency to constituency. In some coun-
tries Facebook alone is so dominant that people
do not know the di#erence between ‘Facebook’
and ‘the internet’, in other countries tradition-
al media remain influential and more trusted
than content that emerges in social media with
murky or unclear attribution

It is beyond this paper to review the state of the
research on social media influence on elections.
On one end stands a much-cited study on the
2010 US Congressional elections, which found
3 Bradshaw, S., Howard, P.N., Challenging Truth and Trust:
A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipula-
tion, page 3
SUMMARYII. BACKGROUND
9
that the addition of a button that stated “I vot-
ed” on a user’s Facebook site, increased the like-
lihood of his/her friends to also turn out to vote
by 2%. This would be a significant e#ect and
while higher turn-out is good in principle, such
a potential to increase turn-out could be abused
(for example to only mobilise in certain social
constituencies or geographic areas).
The disinformation threat of the 2016 US Pres-
idential elections was described thus: “In the
final three months of the US presidential cam-
paign, 20 top-performing false election stories
from hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs gener-
ated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments
on Facebook. Within the same time period, the
20 best-performing election stories from 19 ma-
jor news websites generated a total of 7,367,000
shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.”4
On the more sceptical side of research a 2017

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