Barcelona Metropolis

Anastasia Kavada, Professor of Communication and Politics at the University of Westminster, has been studying the interaction between digital media, social movements and democratic participation for years. Last May she gave a lecture at the Born Centre for Culture and Memory in Barcelona alongside Simona Levi and Paula Kuffer on the massive dissemination of fake news and its ability to degrade democratic systems.

Social media platforms are a reflection of the human condition: they are used to manipulate elections, to spread fake news and to encourage the rise of authoritarianism, but at the same time they are an essential tool for collective organisational processes and for social mobilisations. In short, they portray the best and worst side of human beings. Professor Anastasia Kavada’s line of research focuses on the role of digital platforms in political transformation, with special emphasis on their use by social movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring or Spain’s Los Indignados [The Outraged]. In 2007, she defended her PhD thesis, where she studied the use of email lists and the Internet by activists involved in these and other social movements.

Our perception of social media has taken a 180-degree turn in recent years. During the election campaign that put Donald Trump in the White House, in 2016, Twitter and Facebook presented themselves as neutral content distribution platforms. Four years later, they executed a decision that was both far-reaching and risky: to remove the voice of the president of the United States after he had cast doubts over the postal vote process and encouraged his followers to demonstrate at the Capitol while the legislative branch was counting the votes to confirm Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. The outcome, known to all, of five dead and dozens injured, reflected the serious repercussions of disinformation in democratic societies.

How have we gotten here? Anastasia Kavada claims that, since 2007, social media has facilitated the dissemination of fake news for two reasons. Firstly, on account of the business model, as these platforms need to bring together a large number of people to interact with the content in order to collect data and sell advertising (this business model has been studied and described in detail by journalist Marta Peirano in the book El enemigo conoce el sistema [The Enemy Knows the System], Debate, 2019). Secondly, because personalisation algorithms are used to reinforce our own beliefs, which leads us to increasingly isolate ourselves from those who think differently and to lock us into our ideology, in other words, radicalising ourselves. The phenomenon was described by law professor Cass Sunstein in the book República.com. Internet, democracia y libertad [Republic.com. Internet, Democracy and Freedom] (Paidós, 2003), and popularised by activist Eli Pariser through a TED Talk that later took the form of a book: The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin Books, 2012).

Digital propaganda

Digital propaganda is the last ingredient in this perfect storm. Technology platforms segment users based on their browsing pattern. This way they can know if a person is undecided between two political options a few days prior to an election, and generate personalised advertising content to tip their vote towards a certain position. This is what happened, for example, in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In the words of one of the former employees of the political consulting firm: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on”. Although Cambridge Analytica shut down, there are other companies doing the same job today and, according to Kavada, they operated in the Brexit referendum election process, for example.