ELPIS law review - Leticia

 

By: Leticia Lacerda Cabral, second year, class B, sub-grade 17

Student number: 63603

 

Negative influence that the social networks can have on democratic process and damage to fundamental rights – and how to solve this problem by the fundamental law

 

 Social networks were theorized in the mid-1990s, and the first service named as a "social network" was the so-called Fotolog in the 2000s. The real expansion of social media took place in 2004, when networks used until today, such as Facebook, were created. Its initial goal was to "make the world more connected" - and, as mentioned by Professor Francisco Balaguer Callejón, its potential to increase political participation and even to facilitate the democratic process was soon noticed by the users of these platforms.

 This quality of digital media is still maintained, as can be observed in demonstrations against racism, for example, where in the year 2020, thousands of people around the globe came together to protest racial discrimination after George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by North American police officers. This kind of organizing is a direct reflection of the potential for democratic empowerment that social networks can provide.

 However, as the professor rightly points out, digital media is developing a strong negative impact on the public sphere, due to the direct manipulation that technology companies apply to the opinion of the users of their networks. This hypnosis occurs through algorithms.

All software is a computational interpretation of an algorithm, that is, everything in a cell phone, for example, can be translated into algorithms. In the case of Facebook, there is an algorithm behind the organization, relevance and frequency of content that appears in the "timeline". Called "EdgeRank" by Facebook, it decides what the user sees on the page from a series of factors ranging from cross-references between what friends like and share and by calculating what the user himself tends to find most interesting.

 The professor exposes the case of an Iranian blogger named Hossein Derakhshan, who was arrested in 2008 on charges of cooperation with allegedly hostile countries and political propaganda. However, by the time he was released in 2014 social media had completely changed, due to the mediation made by technology companies, and the consequence, in his words, is that 'The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying’.

The new media can transmit the communication processes in the states and intervene in the public debate through these mechanisms, and even in political agendas and electoral processes, which shows their broad power of regulation and control.

Technology companies, such as those owned by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram...) monopolize the digital sphere and end up creating the so-called plural monism, where social media entice users and radicalize them, distributing radically opposed opinions where there is little or no contact with the other side of the coin.

Human beings have always held conflicting views, and this can be observed countless times in the history of civilizations, and these disagreements have given rise to wars, attacks, genocides, among others. Although these radicalizations are not new, they are fostered using the Internet, where the algorithms work like magnets, attracting users with maximum force to opposite poles. This polarization is not random, nor is it due to the ideology of the platform's creators, but it has one main objective in sight: revenue

The professor points out that an alteration to that alghorithm is possible, and this has even began to be studied by Facebook. However, the results of that research, like an study from 2017 made by the Pew Research Center, showed that posts exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received almost twice as much engagement—including likes and shares—as other types of content on the website, therefore the main consequence of shutting down this mecanism would be a loss of revenue to Facebook, hence the final decision to keep it

The analysed video discusses a lot about the consequences of this algorythm system, through examples that tangibly expose the massive manipulation in the democratic field, likewise the case of 2016´s US elections. The great controversy in that electoral year was the affirmation that Facebook, by means of its polarized alghorythms, ended up electing Donald Trump as president, all due to this huge chain of recommendations to users

In the Portuguese regional sphere, the constitution of the Portuguese Republic presents in its second article, a democratic state of law, also based on the enforcement of fundamental rights and freedoms. In this case it also was observed that these social networks were guilty of an non-observance of the principles from the fundamental law in an ellection that, had it taken place on national territory, could get to be considered fraudulent and unconstitutional

Another matter of concern in social medias is due to the so-called “fake news”, which can be an collorary to the principle of freedom of expression, but when empowered – and even favored – by network alghorythms, they become an damage to the right of information, since the search for the truth becomes impossible in face of an infinite horizon filled with fake news. The news, which once occupied such an wide space in society (In the writing press era), now find themselves subjugated to all other means of entertainment and “information” available on the world wide web, therefore, since they lost value, people no longer feel the need to check the autenticy of their sources, and end up sharing and feeding this vicious cycle of false information

This lack of interess for the truth, added to the mental control of social medias users, creates an growing concern in the legal sphere, since this massive system of users still sees itself regulated by private law – as exposed by Francisco Callejón. I also stand for the professor´s position; the fundamental law needs to be adapteed to the new techonological reality that surrounds it, in order to update the treatment of these new companies. And, although it may not be an exclusive public regulation, limits must be imposed to the actions of these companies, both in internal law and international treaties. Only then it is possible to curb this violation of essential rights and bring back social networks to their primary goal – the connectivity, not control.