About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

30 J. Democracy 25 (2019)
Three Painful Truths about Social Media

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy30 and id is 23 raw text is: The Road to Digital Unfreedom THREE PAINFUL TRUTHS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA Ronald J. Deibert Ronald J. Deibert is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and director of the Citizen Lab at the University's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. His books include Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (2013). Social media have taken a beating lately. The gloss has worn off the large companies that dominate the sector, and with it much of the inter- net. Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, have all been sub- jected to intense scrutiny because of the negative externalities that their services create. A focus of concern has been the abuse of social-media channels as part of efforts to influence the outcome of major political events, including the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the United King- dom and the U.S. presidential election later that year. In both cases, studies and intelligence reports show, nation-states and nonstate actors alike exploited, manipulated, and abused social media as a tool of their information operations. The role that social-media analytics firms played in these events was especially pronounced.1 The situation presents a striking contrast both to the ways in which social-media platforms present themselves, and to how they have been widely perceived in the digital age. Once it was conventional wisdom to assume that these platforms would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society. Now, they are increasingly seen as contributing to society's ills. Growing numbers of people are coming to believe that social media have too much influ- ence on important social and political conversations.2 Others are begin- ning to notice that we are spending unhealthy amounts of time staring at our devices, socializing online while in fact cut off from one another and from nature. As a result of this growing unease, there are pushes to regulate social- media companies in ways that will encourage them to be better stewards of their platforms, to respect privacy, and to acknowledge the role of hu- Journal of Democracy Volume 30, Number 1 January 2019 © 2019 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most