https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/17/web-blade-runner-lies-misinformation-internet
As decades of academic communications research have shown, people tend to adopt opinions they think are common, what the internet researcher Samuel Woolley calls “manufacturing consensus”. Faking social media accounts leads not just to individual users being deceived, but to a society that loses touch with what it really thinks, where what it “really thinks” can be reprogrammed.
In a discourse that can be so easily distorted, it is tempting to give up on any hopes for a democratic public sphere, where ideas and evidence are weighed and debated, and decided on by real citizens, and where one person has one voice. This is a challenge to the primacy of democracy as a model for governance. The message of today’s digitally driven dictatorships, from China to Saudi Arabia, is that democracy cannot cope with the online dimension, and in the confusion it’s better to surrender freedom of choice to centralised powers that use our data to make decisions for us.
Like any dodgy salesman, they promise you tantalising dreams of unverifiable victories. At the right price they claim to have the “magic sauce” to win you elections, manipulate the behaviour of your enemies, bankrupt your rivals’ business.
“Team Jorge”, an Israeli online black ops unit uncovered by the Guardian and its partners in a stunning sting operation, is part of a whole scuzzy industry (“Team Jorge” deny responsibility).
Instead of the malign Blade Runner city, where all is owned by exploitative companies with an underbelly of online bandits, it would have the digital equivalent of public parks, libraries, town halls. But we are nowhere near it now.
So can we survive today? What can you do if you’re, for the sake of argument, an activist who wants to undermine mobilisation for Russia’s genocidal wars? Or you’re running a campaign to disrupt the far right in Europe? Or the narcos in Latin America? Will you wait for a new internet? We don’t have time. No, you will go to the dark alleys of our Blade Runner internet and seek out a Jorge.