Internet: a democratic public space

or fragmented public space?

Context
• On the 18th of October, 2019, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s
stance of not banning political advertisements on the world’s most
widely used social networking platform on the grounds that it would
be against freedom of expression. Zuckerberg avers that since many
political figures and their view-points do not find adequate coverage
in mainstream media, Facebook which he describes as the ‘fifth pillar’
of democracy, must serve as the space or the platform wherein the
marginalized, the lesser known political voices can articulate their
views.
Internet as Democratic public space
• diverse discourses can clash and debate with each other
• diverse views jostle for attention
create a breathtakingly vast collage of divergent political, economic and
social perspectives
Internet as Fragmentation of public space
• information flows can be manipulated to undermine democracy by
allowing the unchecked spread of propaganda and pseudo-facts, all
made more efficient by the Internet, automation, and machine
learning
• propaganda or hate-speech or fake news - serve the interests of a few
and polarise the rest
Democracy’s Dilemma
• Authors Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier - Democracy’s Dilemma
“Democracies depend on the free flow of accurate information more
fundamentally than autocracies do, not only for functioning markets and
better public policy, but also to allow citizens to make informed voting
decisions, provide policy input, and hold officials accountable. At the
same time, information flows can be manipulated to undermine
democracy by allowing the unchecked spread of propaganda and
pseudo-facts, all made more efficient by the Internet, automation, and
machine learning. This is Democracy’s Dilemma: the open forms of input
and exchange that it relies on can be weaponized to inject falsehood and
misinformation that erode democratic debate.”
Democracy’s Dilemma
• Democracy depends on free flow of public information that helps
• Functioning markets
• Better public policy
• Citizens participation leading to policy inputs and accountability
• Flow of information can be manipulated by some who spread fake
news and propaganda using internet

The dilemma is neither accidental nor inevitable but an outcome of the

structure of social networking sites, which can be corrected
Liberalism’s dilemma
• Individuals Privacy is very important
• Hayek argues
• that it is only in primitive societies that the social and the society encroaches upon the private individual
• In a democratic modern society, individual’s liberty is her most cherished value and that liberty is ensured in ensuring the
existence of a private space of the individual which nobody can encroach upon
• Ayn Rand also airs a similar understanding of privacy as being the mark of individual liberty when, in 1943, she
states:
• “Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” From this perspective, capitalism’s emphasis on the private sphere and
the resultant privacy made it the world’s great civilizer.”
• Liberalism and libertarians celebrate, therefore, privacy as the mark of individual liberty
• Liberalism argues that the right to privacy is inalienable because it guarantees the individual her liberty. Samuel
Earle articulates this link between liberalism and privacy in his 2017 essay, Capitalism versus Privacy as follows:
• “As an economic system founded on the idea of a private sphere — consisting of private individuals who own private property
and make private profit in private markets — capitalism is assumed to protect individual privacy. The sanctity of the private realm
allegedly ensures maximum freedom for the individual, as producers and consumers are liberated from unwanted interference
from the state and nosy neighbours.”
• The sacrosanct status of privacy in the discourse of liberal capitalism which is increasingly threatened by the rise
of what is variously termed as data capitalism or surveillance capitalism
Public space as per Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay,
What is enlightenment?
• Kant envisions the public space as a space where there is ‘public exercise of reason’.
• Individuals, in their private capacities, are controlled by a number of constraints:
• they as preachers affiliated to a church are bound by oath to spread its doctrines;
• soldiers, they are bound to follow the commands of their senior officers;
• as managers, they are constrained to uphold their company decisions even if they don’t agree with them.
• But in the public space, they speak not as soldiers, or managers or preachers or professors or
judges constrained by the rules of the institutions which they represent but as citizens, and as
citizens, they have the freedom to question every rule, every decision.
• No institution is so sacred as to be beyond the scrutiny of questions in the public space.
• For Kant, democracy was unimaginable without public space, and a public space could not be called
so if it did not have citizens unfettered by the weight of tradition and dogmas.
• Kant also feels that nothing, not even the sovereign (who was the king in his era) had the right to
control the public space, which, if we may repeat, is a space of questioning and debating every
idea, every principle and every rule.
Surveillance
• Hal Varian says, surveillance is good because it guarantees safety and
convenience

• Surveillance leads to data harvesting: collection and monetization of data

• More the data collected, more accurate results by algorithms about the ‘choices’ of
consumers.
• More accurate the predictions of algorithms, more effective the targeted ads
• More the targeted ads, more the rise of filter bubbles, flooding, fake news, dark
spots, walled gardens and weakening of net neutrality.
• More these tools of polarization and misinformation rises, more the weakening of
the internet as a public space.
• Its fragmentation follows
The Red Mars (Science fiction novel)
• Philosopher of science Alexandr Bogdanov stated in his science fiction novel, The Red Mars
that a technology driven can be emancipatory for humanity only if the basic and fundamental
knowledge of the working and nature of the technologies are known to all, including the
poorest of the masses. Otherwise, if its knowledge is controlled only by a few ‘experts’ or
scientists or engineers, there will be a hierarchical society in which those who know will wield
far greater power than those of don’t.

• Therefore, it is an ethical imperative that in order to safeguard the potential of the internet as
a public space and to curb its fragmentation, these tools of fragmentation such as filter-
bubble, bot-generated information, fake news, dark spots and flooding are curbed.
• And one important way to curb them is to render them inefficacious which can happen only if
the nature and working of these tools and the advertisement driven model of many websites,
social networking sites and apps are understood by all their users, and not just a few
‘experts’.