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The Washington Posts newish motto, Democracy Dies in Darkness, received a mixed response. Naturally most of the response was snark. The name of a Batman sequel? A heavy-metal album? Har.

My own preferred motto would be The Posts unofficial one, Follow the Money. Now if The Post put that under its masthead and reported the news with the goal being to understand the extent and influence of money in the political process, wed really be getting somewhere. But at least Democracy Dies in Darkness tells people that there are important consequences to being able to report the news.

But what if democracy dies anyway? What if it can happen in full view of everybody? This is no longer a fanciful question.

What if the voters of the United States dont really care about democracy anymore? What if, instead of sunlight on the process, they are perfectly happy to accept the neon and strobing of a windowless, clockless casino floor?

Let us look at the signs.

We used to have a class of low-information voters. But they have now been cultivated and transformed into wrong-information voters. This was done on purpose. They consist, to a degree, of what psychological studies have identified as people who are actually inclined toward authoritarianism rather than open societies. Note the fact that whether or not President Trump benefited by Russia doing everything it could think of to undermine our election, neither he nor anyone in his administration seems the least bit bothered by the interference, or apparently inclined to do anything about it. And ask his voters if they care either.

We had baked into our cake a Senate with skewed representation, but since then weve added, via gerrymandering, a House of Representatives that is skewed in the same direction. And throw in an electoral college that has given the presidency to someone who lost the popular vote two out of the last three presidents. And then note that the party which has benefited from all this non-representativeness has gamed the system further in a way that will also give it control of the Supreme Court.

The very ethos of a shared democratic destiny of equal citizens has been continuously eroded and replaced with a me-first standard of whoever dies with the most toys wins. Yes, that old semi-humorous bumper-sticker slogan actually seems to be our current governing principle and main measure of the successful American.

This all happened while we were all wide awake and presumably paying attention. Until we now find ourselves with a government that does not, in fact, represent the voting preferences or policy preferences of, you know, the majority of voters. And this unrepresentative government is not taking the healing course of tacking to the center, to balance the inequitable results by reaching out to the other side. No, far from it, and as far as you can get. They are not only trying to enact the severest forms of their policy preferences that they can get away with, but also trying to cement the permanence of their control by relentless shifting of wealth to the rich, all the while riding on the growing vehemence of their wrongly informed, authoritarian-inclined base voters.

And in the face of this very deliberately constructed and powerful non-democratic apparatus, we have what? We have the majority of voters, who have a yet-to-be determined commitment to fight for their beliefs, to fight for their sense of justice and to fight for their democracy.

Read the rest here:
Maybe democracy dies in broad daylight - Washington Post

Reefill has reinvented the water fountain as a Bluetooth-enabled subscription service. Photograph: Reefill

Its a hot day in New York City. Youre thirsty, but your water bottle is empty. So you walk into a store and place your bottle in a machine. You activate the machine with an app on your phone, and it fills your bottle with tap water. Now you are no longer thirsty.

This is the future envisioned by the founders of a startup called Reefill. If the premise sounds oddly familiar, thats because it is: Reefill has reinvented the water fountain as a Bluetooth-enabled subscription service. Customers pay $1.99 a month for the privilege of using its machines, located at participating businesses around Manhattan.

Predictably, the company has already come in for its fair share of ridicule. In Slate, Henry Grabar called it tap water in a suit. But while Reefill is a particularly cartoonish example, its basic business model is a popular one within tech. The playbook is simple: take a public service and build a private, app-powered version of it.

The most obvious examples are Uber and Lyft, which aspire not merely to eliminate the taxi industry, but to replace public transportation. Theyre slowly succeeding: municipalities around America are now subsidizing ride-hailing fares instead of running public buses. And earlier this year, Lyft began offering a fixed-route, flat-rate service called Lyft Shuttle in Chicago and San Francisco an aggressive bid to poach more riders from public transit.

These companies wouldnt have customers if better public alternatives existed. It can be hard to find a water fountain in Manhattan, and public transit in American cities ranges from mediocre to nonexistent. But solving these problems by ceding them to the private sector ensures that public services will continue to deteriorate until they disappear.

Decades of defunding and outsourcing have already pushed public services to the brink. Now, fortified with piles of investor cash and the smartphone, tech companies are trying to finish them off.

Proponents of privatization believe this is a good thing. For years, they have advanced the argument that business will always perform a given task better than government, whether its running buses or schools, supplying healthcare or housing. The public sector is sclerotic, wasteful and undisciplined by the profit motive. The private sector is dynamic, innovative and, above all, efficient.

This belief has become common sense in political life. It is widely shared by the countrys elite, and has guided much policymaking over the past several decades. But like most of our governing myths, it collapses on closer inspection.

No word is invoked more frequently or more fervently by apostles of privatization than efficiency. Yet this is a strange basis on which to build their case, given the fact that public services are often more efficient than private ones. Take healthcare. The United States has one of the least efficient systems on the planet: we spend more money on healthcare than anyone else, and in return we receive some of the worst health outcomes in the west. Not coincidentally, we also have the most privatized healthcare system in the advanced world. By contrast, the UK spends a fraction of what we do and achieves far better results. It also happens to provision healthcare as a public service. Somehow, the absence of the profit motive has not produced an epidemic of inefficiency in British healthcare. Meanwhile, we pay nearly $10,000 per capita and a staggering 17% of our GDP to achieve a life expectancy somewhere between that of Costa Rica and Cuba.

A profit-driven system doesnt mean we get more for our money it means someone gets to make more money off of us. The healthcare industry posts record profits and rewards its chief executives with the highest salaries in the country. It takes a peculiar frame of mind to see this arrangement as anything resembling efficient.

A profit-driven system doesnt mean we get more for our money it means someone gets to make more money off of us

Attacking public services on the grounds of efficiency isnt just incorrect, however its beside the point. Decades of neoliberalism have corroded our capacity to think in non-economic terms. Weve been taught that all fields of human life should be organized as markets, and that government should be run like a business. This ideology has found its perverse culmination in the figure of Donald Trump, a celebrity billionaire with no prior political experience who catapulted himself into the White House by invoking his expertise as an businessman. The premise of Trumps campaign was that America didnt need a president it needed a CEO.

Nowhere is the neoliberal faith embodied by Trump more deeply felt than in Silicon Valley. Tech entrepreneurs work tirelessly to turn more of our lives into markets and devote enormous resources towards disrupting government by privatizing its functions. Perhaps this is why, despite Silicon Valleys veneer of liberal cosmopolitanism, it has a certain affinity for the president. On Monday, Trump met with top executives from Apple, Amazon, Google and other major tech firms to explore how to unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services, in the words of Jared Kushner. Between Trump and tech, never before have so many powerful people been so intent on transforming government into a business.

But government isnt a business; its a different kind of machine. At its worst, it can be repressive and corrupt and autocratic. At its best, it can be an invaluable tool for developing and sustaining a democratic society. Among other things, this includes ensuring that everyone receives the resources they need to exercise the freedoms on which democracy depends. When we privatize public services, we dont just risk replacing them with less efficient alternatives we risk damaging democracy itself.

If this seems like a stretch, thats because pundits and politicians have spent decades defining the idea of democracy downwards. It has come to mean little more than holding elections every few years. But this is the absolute minimum of democracys meaning. Its Greek root translates to rule of the people not rule by certain people, such as the rich (plutocracy) or the priests (theocracy), but by all people. Democracy describes a way of organizing society in which the whole of the people determine how society should be organized.

What does this have to do with buses or schools or hospitals or houses? In a democracy, everyone gets to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. But thats impossible if people dont have access to the goods they need to survive if theyre hungry or homeless or sick. And the reality is that when goods are rationed by the market, fewer people have access to them. Markets are places of winners and losers. You dont get what you need you get what you can afford.

By contrast, public services offer a more equitable way to satisfy basic needs. By taking things off the market, government can democratize access to the resources that people rely on to lead reasonably dignified lives. Those resources can be offered cheap or free, funded by progressive taxation. They can also be managed by publicly accountable institutions led by elected officials, or subject to more direct mechanisms of popular control.

These ideas are considered wildly radical in American politics. Yet other places around the world have implemented them with great success. When Oxfam surveyed more than 100 countries, they discovered that public services significantly reduce economic inequality. They shrink the distance between rich and poor by lowering the cost of living. They empower working people by making their survival less dependent on their bosses and landlords and creditors. Perhaps most importantly, they entitle citizens to a share of societys wealth and a say over how its used.

But where will the money come from? This is the perennial question, posed whenever someone suggests raising the welfare state above a whisper. Fortunately, it has a simple answer. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. It is so rich, in fact, that its richest people can afford to pour billions of dollars into a company such as Uber, which loses billions of dollars each year, in the hopes of getting just a little bit richer. In the face of such extravagance, diverting a modest portion of the prosperity we produce in common toward services that benefit everyone shouldnt be controversial. Its a small price to pay for making democracy mean more than a hollow slogan, or a sick joke.

Link:
Privatizing public services could spell their demise and the end of democracy - The Guardian

Why do democracies fail?

Its suddenly a very urgent and important question. Daniel Ziblatts new book arrives just in time to deliver a powerful and supremely relevant answer.

Dont be misled by the aggressively unsensational title, the careful prose, or the hyper-technical charts (Median and Distribution of Conservative and Liberal Party Seats Across Varying Levels of Agricultural Districts in Germany and Britain in Years of Suffrage Reform). Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy is written in fire. It delves deep into long-forgotten electoral histories to emerge with insights of Tocquevillian power, to illuminate not only the past but also the present and future.

Why Conservative Parties Are Central to Democracy

The non-rich always outnumber the rich. Democracy enables the many to outvote the few: a profoundly threatening prospect to the few. If the few possess power and wealth, they may respond to this prospect by resisting democracy before it arrivesor sabotaging it afterward.

Yet despite this potential threat to the formation and endurance of democracy, wealthy countries do often transition peacefully to democracyand then preserve its stability for decades afterward. The classic example is the United Kingdom. Britain commenced a long process of widening the franchise in 1832. By 1918, all adult British men could vote; all British women by 1929. Through that periodand then through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the construction of the welfare state after 1945British politics remained peaceful and stable, offering remarkably little space for radical ideologies of any kind. You could tell a similar story about Sweden (universal male voting by 1907; for women by 1921), orwith allowances for foreign military occupation in wartimeabout Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Once democracy was extended, it was never again seriously questioned by local elites, even when it taxed them heavily.

But this is emphatically not the story of the rest of Europe, most especially not Germany, but also Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and so on. Its not the story of Latin America or of the Arab world.

What makes the difference between those countries in which democracy arrives peacefully and is ever after accepted by alland those in which it is violently contested and continually challenged? That feels no longer a question about bygone times. It feels very much our question too. Based largely on a study of Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, Daniel Ziblatt convincingly offers a surprising and disturbing answer:

The most crucial variable predicting the success of a democratic transition is the self-confidence of the incumbent elites. If they feel able to compete under democratic conditions, they will accept democracy. If they do not, they will not.

And the single thing that most accurately predicts elite self-confidence, as Ziblatt marshals powerful statistical and electoral evidence to argue, is the ability to build an effective, competitive conservative political party before the transition to democracy occurs. That happened in Britain, but not in Germany, as Ziblatt painstakingly details. (If you ever yearned to learn more about German state and local elections under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ziblatt is here to tell you all about it.)

Why not in Germany? Or Italy or elsewhere? Building a vote-winning political party is hard workand work that carries few guarantees of success in advance.

Pre-democratic incumbent elites, precisely because they were incumbents, commanded other options that seemed both easier to execute and seemingly more likely to succeed than democratic competition:

Imperial Germany resorted to all three: a complex constitution that vested real power in ultra-oligarchic state assemblies rather than the national Reichstag; a lively culture of voter intimidation in rural districts; and of course a government that did not ultimately depend on the voters at all.

Imperial German elites controlled the state without the need to win electionsand that taught them to distrust the whole electioneering enterprise. Because they did not need to win elections, they did not build strong parties. And the absence of strong parties, managed by politicians seeking to win the maximum number of votes, left the pre-1914 and post-1918 German right exposed to outside interest groups that quickly and easily overran weak and institutionally porous parties.

Whereas the pragmatic politicians atop the British Conservative party could restrain ideologically motivated activists, the German Conservatives succumbed to them. The successful British Conservatives could look at Labour governments as unpleasant but ultimately temporary intervals. The Imperial German Conservatives experienced the loss of control of the state after 1918 as an unrecoverable catastrophe to which they could never be reconciled.

One of Ziblatts sharpest insights was that the failure to build an effective conservative party left incumbent elites in Germany and elsewhere too weak to say yes. They could not join the democratic system. They could only resent and resist it.

Probably you are already hearing some echoes in our own time. Its been aptly said that the United States is experiencing an era of strong partisanship but weak parties. This phrase describes the American right even more accurately than the American liberal-left. The organized Republican party lacked the strength to deny its presidential nomination to Donald Trumpand once Trump had gained that nomination, the vehement partisanship of Republican supporters secured him their general election votes despite the distaste so many felt for him. Just as in pre-1914 Germany, an institutionally porous party had been quickly and easily overrun from outside.

Its a striking feature of American politics since 2008 that the Republican right has combined extraordinary down-ballot electoral success with an ever-intensifying pessimism about American society.

If you listen to conservative discussion and debate, its hard to miss the rising tone of skepticism about democracyand increasing impatience with the claim that everybody should have convenient access to the ballot. The pessimism about the society and the weakness of the party have left Republicans vulnerable to an authoritarian populist like Donald Trump. Party rules that would once have screened out a Trump have given way to partisan antagonisms that empower him.

Some conservative intellectuals attribute Trumps ascendancy to a betrayal of conservative ideals. Thats true so far as it goes. But the more relevant truth, as Ziblatt teaches us, is that Trump arose because of the hollowing out of conservative institutions. The Republican party could not stop him. Now it cannot restrain him. And this weakness of the Republican partyand its craven subordination to the ego, ambition, and will-to-power of one mannow stands as the gravest immediate threat to American democracy: a lesson from the 19th century of frightening immediacy to the 21st.

Excerpt from:
Why Do Democracies Fail? - The Atlantic

Foto: LATINNO.

Francesc Badia: Thank you, Thamy, for having us. Let's start with the idea behind the LATINNO Project.

Thamy Pogrebinschi: The idea behind the LATINNO Project is to call attention to the vast experimentation that has been happening in Latin America over the last two decades. There is a lot of talk about democratic innovation and participatory government in Latin America, and the only example is always the participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Perhaps one or two more participatory processes have been studied recently, but still after so many years it is always the participatory budgeting in Brazil the main example of participatory governance. With the LATINNO Project I want to show that there is much more going on in Latin America, not only the participatory budget and not only Brazil or Porto Alegre. So, the idea was providing such information, providing data on different innovations that exist across eighteen countries in Latin America. My decision to collect this data and open it immediately seeks to allow more research on all those innovations and on all those countries. It has also a practical aim, which is enabling policy makers, civil society organizations, governments and international organizations alike to get information on what exists and to compare what works and what does not work, and see how things can work in different ways and how democracy has been experimented in different contexts and different settings. In sum, the idea behind LATINNO was to build this dataset which will be online and accessible to all, but also to provide understanding and knowledge about this vast experimentation with innovative ways of doing politics. Thats why LATINNO is not only the dataset, it is not only about mapping innovations. It is a research project, mainly. Besides the dataset we have other outcomes, like the first democratic innovations index and our own publications containing our findings.

Francesc: There are three concepts at LATINNO that you may want to go through. The first one is democratic innovations, and how you define democratic innovation, what you see as really innovative. The second concept is how the quality of democracy is measured, and how do you categorize it: voting, participating, the deliberation processes, the level of representation? And the third concept has to do with the pragmatic approach through which this research has been developed, especially when defining what's political experimentation, and how it is characteristic of democracy in Latin America. Let's start with the first concept, democratic innovation. How do you understand it?

Thamy: I would say I have a concept of democratic innovations which is broader than the one used in the academia, but more specific than the one used by practitioners and activists. In academic debates, democratic innovations are usually defined as being new institutional designs that aim at expanding citizen participation in political decision-making. What is at stake in this definition is having more citizens participating, namely expanding the number of citizens involved in decision making. I see two limitations here, one is the underlying assumption that just by increasing the number of citizens engaged democracy will be improved. The second is that such engagement should necessarily take place at the decision-making level. On the theoretical level I think it is complicated to think on participation as an end in itself, assuming that participation per se improves democracy; and on the empirical level the actual experiments do involve citizens in other stages of the policy process, not only decision making, and they are still innovative and democratic. Based on this theoretical consideration and empirical observation, I define democratic innovations as institutions and practices whose end is enhancing at least one of the dimensions of the quality of democracy by means of citizen participation in at least one of the stages of the policy process. So, in my conceptualization, which has oriented how cases in the LATINNO project has been searched, citizen participation is not an end in itself; it is a means to achieve a larger end, an improvement in democracy, in one of the dimensions of what we call the quality of democracy. Those means of participation are diverse, they may involve deliberation, e-participation, direct voting, and forms of citizen representation. Of course, citizen participation is also something that improves democracy, especially if citizen participation involves political inclusion, namely the participation of those who are underrepresented. Thats why I take political inclusion as one of the ends citizen participation in democratic innovations can achieve, among others. So, an innovation is not democratic simply because it allows citizens to participate or because it expands the number of citizens that participate. It is democratic because it is a means of participation, a tool through which citizens themselves can do something for democracy. And this can be done not only at the decision-making stage. Citizens can provide inputs to policy makers and set the policy agenda, they can participate in the formulation of the policy, they can have a role in the very implementation of policies, and they can also evaluate, that is monitor policies that have already been decided and implemented. This is how I broaden the concept, by considering all stages of the policy process as being relevant for citizen participation and not only decision-making. If one only looks for processes where citizens take decisions, we miss a lot of what is going on in terms of democratic experimentation. Political decisions have been taken differently by decision-makers because citizens set agendas or monitor policies, thats the change one must look at to understand how participation is something that outgrows representation without exactly competing with it.

Francesc: Absolutely. The second concept we can discuss is what you define as quality of democracy, or democratic quality, which is multidimensional. Democracy it is not only about voting, but also about participating, including the deliberation process, key to the quality of democracy. Here, we should also talk about representation, and how, within the limits of representation, some processes may trigger innovation overcoming the existing gap between those in power and the citizenship. It is also important to discuss the limits of representation.

Thamy: I see the concept of quality of democracy also somehow in a broader way than that which is used by the scholarship and the indices that measure the quality of democracy. But I also try to frame this concept vis--vis democratic innovations, using an analytical framework that enables them to be assessed and which will hopefully contribute to the measurement of the quality of democracy, because those thousands of new institutional designs do matter for democracy and must be considered in such measurements. I do identify five dimensions of quality of democracy that can be activated by innovations, that is, through citizen participation: accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, political inclusion and social equality. Citizens can enhance the quality of democracy by participating in these new spaces, mechanisms, practices in such ways as to bring about more social equality, or more political inclusion, or both. When citizens get together, discuss and voice their demands, when they identify problems in their cities and report them in apps, when they make policy recommendations online or offline, they may increase responsiveness or accountability, because innovations increase the chances that the government hears those demands, it gives governments more opportunities beyond elections to know what citizens expect. At the LATINNO Project we look at how innovations are designed to impact on one or more of these five the dimensions of the quality of democracy. We also look at the different means of participation that can activate those five dimensions, or democratic qualities, and expect that different combinations of means and ends may improve democracy.

Francesc: Now, let's talk about the limits of representation.

Thamy: There is a lot of discussion on how representation is in crisis, how democracy is in crisis, but to call it crisis reveals our inability to see that actually democracy has changed. We do have to accept that and move on, understand that maybe democracy doesnt mean anymore what it meant once. The institutions that lead us to think of democracy as being representative are still there and might be still there for a long long time. We cannot get rid of parliaments, the judicial power, and the executive power, they may never be substituted for innovations, but innovations change the way they work. Many innovations started to be developed within representative institutions or as a devolution of power from them, but also and especially, they surround them and have an impact on them as they allow citizens to set their agendas, provide inputs for policies, change the way they take decisions and implement those decisions. It is important that we look at those changes, those institutional changes. And thats our aim at the LATINNO Project, we built this database to call attention to those new democratic forms and practices, those experimentations with democracy, those changes in olds institutions. Our database comprises 2,400 different institutional designs in eighteen countries. Those are all cases where citizens participate in one of the stages of the policy process aiming at improving democracy, that is, aiming at enhancing accountability, or responsiveness, or political inclusion, or social equality, or the rule of law. Those new institutional designs, or changes on how old institutions work, this is what makes processes of citizen participation innovations. And all this go beyond representation even if it takes place within representative democracy and within representative institutions. We might not be able to see this change now, and thats why there is so much talk about the crisis of representation instead of talk about the changes of representation and of democracy itself. Were experiencing something in recent years that we may only recognize and be able to name in the future. There is a heritage of recent governments in Latin America, especially those associated with the left turn, that has to do with a new way of doing politics through participation, new ways of setting priorities, taking decisions, implementing and evaluating them. So participation is not the opposite of representation, it is something that changes representation from the inside. It is not a surprise that, as the LATINNO data shows, about one third of democratic innovations in Latin America involve a form of citizen representation. Citizen representing citizens, talking in the name of others, but also doing for others, sometimes with other citizens, sometimes together with the government, this is a trend, it is a change in the very concept of representation, something that show how it is expanded through participation instead of competing or conflicting with it.

Francesc: My last point is about experimentation. The Project often mentions how experimentation is a characteristic of Latin American democracies. Yet, what is specifically characteristic of this experimentation? What are the conditions that trigger experimentation, and why is Latin America more experimental than other political spaces? What are your findings?

Thamy: First Ill start with why Latin America is more experimental. Latin America has newer, younger democracies. The age of institutions makes them more flexible somehow, they can adapt better to new circumstances. Underlying that that there are some conditions in Latin America that seem to favor this political experimentation, like the re-democratization, which has re-empowered citizens and civil society organizations through their fight against authoritarianism. With the democratization process comes the constitutionalization process. New constitutions are written and they protect against authoritarianism by guaranteeing citizen participation. This is the case of Brazil, for example. In addition to that, regardless of authoritarian background there are countries that have enacted lots of new legislation that favor citizen participation and institutionalize new institutional designs. Several laws in different countries in the region try to include citizens in the political process and mandate new institutions or institutional changes to accomplish that. Colombia is one of these countries. A third general condition is decentralization. Virtually all Latin American countries have undergone decentralization processes. So, they have devolved power to the municipalities, and empowered the local level, where several innovations have been tried out. New political parties, or opposition parties that were shadowed during authoritarian periods that started to do politics in a different way, first at the local level, later at the national level, especially after the left turn and the turn of the century. However, more important than being left or right, center left or center right, the LATINNO data shows that regardless of ideological orientation, political parties do have a role in changing democracy through innovations when they are in the government. Finally, another condition is the cultural and ethnical diversity of Latin America. There are, for example, traditions of deliberation that came from civil society as it opposed authoritarianism, and also from indigenous communities, and these practices were incorporated into new institutions. So, historically those would be the conditions. But then practically, empirically, what we see are several attempts to trying to do democracy through different means. We have these different means of doing policy, through deliberation, citizen participation, e-participation, direct voting, and we combine all of that in different ways depending on the problems that we have to address, the ends we want to achieve. This is democratic experimentation.

Continue reading here:
Latin America: democracy beyond representation - Open Democracy

June 21, 2017 by Hadley Newman And Kevin O'gorman, The Conversation Bottery and aggravated assault. Credit: Mopic

Propaganda bots posing as people are increasingly being used on social media to sway public opinion around the world. So says new research from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, which found automated accounts and other forms of social media propaganda are rife in Russia, the US and Germany among other countries.

This follows a flurry of material about bots and the UK election. One seminal work, which came from the same institute, showed that Twitter traffic had been dominated by Labour and that automated accounts favouring the party were more active than Tory equivalents.

Jeremy Corbyn's campaign was certainly boosted by fake Twitter accounts, regardless of whether his people had any involvement in setting them up. They were spewing an average of 1,000 messages a day against Theresa May or favouring Labour.

It was a similar story in last year's US presidential election, and also during the Brexit referendum with some of the bots in question graduating to pump out thousands more messages in the UK election. A study by the FT reported that during the referendum campaign, "the 20 most prolific accounts displayed indications of high levels of automation". This supported research last year, again from Oxford, that found that "on average 12.3% of traffic about UK politics is generated by highly automated accounts".

Bot seriously

That digital media would emerge as a tool for political campaigning is a no-brainer. At no point in history have candidates and parties had such a remarkable opportunity to reach out to such a wide audience so effectively.

Leaders can relay their messages in the most cost-effective manner with real evidence of interaction. Better still, social media provides a platform for two-way engagement. The average voter can boo, applaud, vent and taunt politicians and policies on their smartphones with a flick of a finger.

But politics is a game of one-upmanship and not just among parties but also over the public. For all the windows of expression that digital media has opened up for people, it now threatens to make fools of them.

Bots with large numbers of followers are the ideal conduits for disinformation, sharing fake news within the echo chambers that have grown out of the content display logic of social media algorithms. Some of this news will be crafted specifically for political gain, but even this doesn't always necessarily follow.

The US media reported, for example, that an army of Macedonian teenagers had been operating US political sites peddling made-up conservative news to make a quick buck on Facebook. With 44% of Americans getting their news from Facebook, and Donald Trump elected president, we may be paying a hefty price for such enterprises.

As one detailed report put it, media manipulators trade their stories by "using the power of networked collaboration and the reach of influencers". Even "when the misinformation is debunked, it continues to shape people's attitudes". Such overt mind manipulation can "ruin democracy", warned the report.

Speaking of ruining democracy, algorithms are also opening the door to another kind of Facebook manipulation. During the UK election, there were reports of "paid-for attack advertising" targeting specific voters in specific constituencies. The Conservatives have been particularly identified with this so-called "dark advertising". It threatens to break fundamental rules about campaign transparency and voter targeting. It also undermines the UK's longstanding ban on political parties buying TV and radio space.

Not OK, computer

From radio to TV to the internet, every new medium has disrupted the political space. Each has served as a new tool to expand the audience and sharpen the dialogue. With social media, however, we find ourselves in unique territory.

The public has to wake up to the very real reality that fake news, junk news and automated tweets are almost certainly muddling political discourse and making different factions more and more polarised. Rhetoric and sloganeering are giving way to digital subterfuge and guerilla assaults on the public psyche.

People in the UK could console themselves that they are sharing "better quality information" than many US counterparts, but equally they compare poorly next to the French and Germans. In any case, favourable comparisons are beside the point.

It is time for a proper debate about how we respond to these developments. There is a clear argument for a system reboot, including a digital media code of conduct for political parties and campaigners. Bots need to be banned under this code and the system needs to be policed in real time during campaigns the money it would cost would be well spent. The reality is that social media campaigning is rendering our democracy unfit for purpose. We need to do something about it quickly.

Explore further: Pro-Trump bot activity 'colonised' pro-Clinton Twitter campaign: study

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Researchers have revealed the scale of automated account activity, including bots, during the US Election. The pro-Trump camp used it 'up to five times as much as Clinton supporters' and employed it aggressively, crowding ...

Democracy has entered a new phase marked by hacking by foreign states and fake stories shared on social media aimed at damaging political parties. The social media companies have so far been mostly incapable, or unwilling, ...

Software robots masquerading as humans are influencing the political discourse on social media as never before and could threaten the very integrity of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, said Emilio Ferrara, a computer ...

A trending story on Twitter could mean thousands of people care about an issue-or that some computers are doing their jobs.

The advent of social media has led to a vast increase in the amount of social information that we see about others' political behaviour and this has important implications for democracy, argues Professor Helen Margetts in ...

A University of Texas at Arlington-led team is building computer tools to detect social bots within the worldwide web that create and spread fake news.

A telecom company in the Netherlands has teamed up with the country's traffic safety authority to develop a bicycle lock that also blocks its mobile network, in a move aimed at protecting young riders who regularly pedal ...

A data analytics firm that worked on the Republican campaign of Donald Trump exposed personal information belonging to some 198 million Americans, or nearly every eligible registered voter, security researchers said Monday.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi's lab have given the first demonstration of three-dimensional imaging of objects through walls using ordinary wireless signal. The technique, which involves two drones ...

From "The Jetsons" to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", flying cars have long captured the imagination.

Your next doctor could very well be a bot. And bots, or automated programs, are likely to play a key role in finding cures for some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases and conditions.

The long range of airborne drones helps them perform critical tasks in the skies. Now MIT spinout Open Water Power (OWP) aims to greatly improve the range of unpiloted underwater vehicles (UUVs), helping them better perform ...

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Political bots are poisoning democracy so, off with their heads - Phys.Org