The role of some modern, digital media and social platforms as spreaders of fake news and accelerators of disinformation, aggressive nationalism, xenophobia, racism or even fascism is secondary. They amplify and spread disinformation and stereotypes originally produced mostly by traditional media and state actors, writes Petros Papaconstantinou.
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, coined the term “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in early 2016, when technological optimism was still dominant among Western elites. His conception was that the merging of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Robotics, Gene Editing and the Internet of Things is bringing fundamental changes to the ways we live, work and communicate, giving us “the opportunity to help everyone, including leaders, policymakers and people from all income groups and nations to create an inclusive, human-centred future”. He saw it as a huge rising tide, lifting every boat, big or small.
When it comes to information, politics and human rights, smartphones and social networks were extolled as the voice of the voiceless, powerful weapons of ordinary people against authoritarian regimes. This was the Zeitgeist, the atmosphere, after the short Arab Spring that was followed by a long Arab Winter, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the “Euromaidan” coup in Kiev.
Strangely, the Greek Spring did not find the same enthusiastic reception among the same elites in the same period. I am referring to the huge wave of demonstrations, general strikes and actions of public disobedience in Greece against the Draconian austerity measures imposed by the EU and the IMF in the aftermath of the debt crisis in the Eurozone. On the contrary, Greek people were stigmatized as lazy and irresponsible, living far beyond their means and becoming a burden for the North European taxpayer. Serious German newspapers recalled the ancient fable of the hard-working ant and the reckless grasshopper. The broad social movement in our country was demonized as manipulated by the radical Left, which allegedly wanted to come to power in order to make Greece a kind of Trojan Horse of Russia within the EU and NATO. Of course, nothing like this ever materialised.
Anyway, by 2016 technological optimism had already given way to anxiety due to the double shock of 2016, the successive wins of Brexit and Donald Trump. All of a sudden, the potentially emancipatory potential of the Digital Revolution was forgotten. The new, digital media and the social networks were blamed as industries of fake news, satanic tools for citizens’ manipulation by obscure forces, including foreign powers. The catalyst was the disclosures regarding Cambridge Analytica, a British political marketing firm that gained illegal access to the personal data of 87 million citizens, mainly in the United States, through their Facebook accounts and used them to launch targeted campaigns on behalf of Donald Trump. Soon afterwards, the Russian connection was made. The CEOs of both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had to testify before Congress and the House of Commons, which were investigating alleged links to the Kremlin.
Nothing was ever proved, but widespread suspicion poisoned both the political life of major Western countries and East-West relations as a harbinger of the more serious crises to come. Few journalists and experts reminded their public that the Cambridge Analytica case was not something really new. In the US presidential campaign of 2008, Eric Schmidt, then Google’s CEO, was a leading figure in Barack Obama’s campaign. His team had managed to collect the personal data of 250 million Americans through Facebook, a number that exceeded the electoral body, and used this information for the benefit of the Democrat candidate. Still, it is easier to demonise scapegoats, in this case Russia, than to wonder about the real problem, the alarming dominance of the new oligarchs in the digital sphere and their enormous potential for manipulating huge numbers of consumers, citizens and voters.
There’s no doubt that digital technologies have thoroughly transformed the domain of information. In 1986, just 1% of the world’s information was digitized. By 2013, this figure was already 98%. Nevertheless, the flaws of disinformation and misinformation by mainstream media largely predate the digital era. I cannot forget the media frenzy about Timisoara’s alleged “mass graves”, the black cormorant and the hundreds of babies allegedly thrown out of their incubators by Iraqi troops during the first Gulf War of 1991 – stories that proved to be fabricated lies. One should not be astonished. On April 20, 2008, The New York Times revealed that 75 commentators at CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC were either working for the military- industrial complex or were closely related to it.
I do not mean to underestimate the role of some modern, digital media and social platforms as spreaders of fake news and accelerators of disinformation, aggressive nationalism, xenophobia, racism or even fascism. My point is that their role is secondary. They amplify and spread disinformation and stereotypes originally produced mostly by traditional media and state actors. Just one example: According to BBC, the most influential video posted during the Euromaidan protests was the moving testimony of a young Ukrainian woman, calling for political change. It went viral on YouTube and was reproduced by the major TV channels in the West. Later it became clear that the video was produced by the American director Ben Moses, producer of the movie “Good Morning Vietnam”. He was helped by Larry Daimond, an American scholar and advisor to the State Department. As for the actress, Yulia Marushevska, she was appointed in June 2015 to the Odessa administration by the notorious Mikhail Saakashvili, later imprisoned in Georgia for abuse of power.
At that time, a journalist could double-check the dramatic events in Ukraine by watching both Western and Russian media, not taking a priori at face value either of them. Since February 2022, this has not been the case, as our leaders in the West, in spite of their commitment to freedom of expression, have deprived us of access to RT or RIA Novosti. All Russian channels were blocked simultaneously from YouTube by Google’s Alphabet. So much for the illusion that the new, digital world would be a paradise of freedom.
The familiar cliché that “truth is the first victim of every war” found numerous confirmations in the ongoing, ferocious Israeli war on Gaza. Once again, traditional media called the shots. A TV channel, i24news, was the first to report beheaded babies at the site of the Kfar Aza kibbutz massacre. The story not only went viral on social media¸ but was even vouched for by then-US President Joe Biden and then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, both of whom said they were shown images that corroborated it. Soon afterwards, the Israeli Army said there was no evidence to support the allegation and CNN concluded it was fake.
My country is no exception to this frustrating media landscape. During the past three years, Reporters Without Borders dropped Greece from 70th to 107th place in its Media Freedom Index. One of the main reasons was Predatorgate, a major political scandal: some 33 high profile persons had been monitored by either Predator spyware and/or the Greek National Intelligence Service, supervised personally by our prime minister. Among the targeted persons were the leader of the third political party (PASOK), ministers, the chief of the National Defence General Staff and several journalists and businessmen.
The official investigation just buried the case, but Predatorgate added a new piece of evidence to what the distinguished American scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “Surveillance Capitalism”. In her highly influential book, she claims that the ability of the new oligarchs of the digital sphere to steal our personal data, predict and manipulate our behaviour, constitutes a “direct intervention into the free will, an assault on human autonomy”. She describes surveillance capitalism as “a significant threat to human nature in the 21st century, as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the 19th and 20th century”.
Zuboff’s stern warning should not be understood as capitulation to technological pessimism but as a call for struggle. We should not accept a dystopian, Orwellian future as the inescapable destiny of humankind, nor should we ignore the huge, potentially emancipatory potential of the digital era. Technology only sets the terrain of the battle. Political leaders, state actors and social movements will decide the winners and the losers. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing cataclysmic changes in the global financial and geopolitical environment. Data is becoming the oil of the 21st century and, as president Putin put it already in September 2017, the winners of the race for AI will be the future masters of the world.
There is no doubt that we live in very interesting times. The late British statesman, Austen Chamberlain, insisted that the wish “May you live in interesting times” was meant to be a curse in ancient China, in the sense that interesting times are usually times of trouble. To my knowledge, there is no Chinese source to corroborate this pessimistic interpretation. In any case, I personally prefer another, more optimistic view of turbulent times coming from the modern People’s Republic of China. A famous quote attributed to its founder says: “There is great disorder under the Heavens. The situation is excellent”. In this sense of historical – not technological – optimism, I rest my case saying: Yes, we do live in most interesting times. Let’s make the best of it.