In an unclear election Trump's Big Tech foes could hand him a second term
We are always in a bubble of sorts during elections; the people we socialize with, the influences we have in our lives. Technology has opened our eyes to worlds generations before us could not access, but in 2020 are our bubbles getting smaller? As we sit in our homes for months on end in different stages of lockdown, scrolling on social media, search engines and the wider media, this election has shaped up to be wildly different in ways no one could have envisaged a year ago.
Big Tech has undoubtedly impacted democracy - but exactly how? How are Americans interacting with news about Donald Trump in comparison to Joe Biden? And could social media and Google have the power to change the outcome of an unclear or contentious election result?
Who is winning - Trump or Biden?
He may not be faring so well in the polls, but one race Trump is winning is in news domination. It likely won’t surprise you to read that more articles are written about him. As both the incumbent candidate and generally more news-generating person, articles about Donald Trump have more page views (i.e. clicks) than Joe Biden. However, according to exclusive data provided to The Independent by Taboola, the race is closer than one may think - and hugely varies from state to state.
When you look at page views per article, Biden is not far behind. Specifically, Biden was closest in several swing states, which could indicate readers examining the pair with a closer eye than in stronghold Democrat or Republican states. According to Taboola, the data was closest in the following states: Florida (4% difference), Georgia (6% difference), Iowa (3% difference), Michigan (7% difference), Minnesota (2% difference), and Texas (9% difference). However the closest state was the Vice President’s home state - Delaware, with just a 1% favor to Trump.
Despite this, there is no escaping that most interest is in Trump. The below chart shows interest in various election related subjects over recent months - with Trump trouncing everything from coronavirus to Black Lives Matter. However, Taboola did note that interest in Trump has declined over the 90-day time period, whereas Biden's readership numbers saw a slight increase, gaining 9% in the second half of the 90-day period.
The president also wins the social media race, with 87.3m Twitter followers to Biden’s 11.8m. On Facebook it is 30m to 3.4m, and 23.1m to 5.6m on Instagram. “President Trump has a massive — and often highly engaged — audience on social media, especially on Twitter,” Professor Kate Starbird of the University of Washington says. “His tweets are rapidly propagated, amplified, commented on. This activity profoundly shapes, and some are arguing distorts, the information space. In other words, social media have certainly provided a platform for Trump to reach and grow his audiences — and he has seized upon that opportunity.”
Although there are many differences this election, this remains constant from 2016. "Trump dominated the political landscape and the news cycle in 2016, he dominated the political news cycle and landscape throughout his presidency, and he's dominating it now,” author of Beyond the Valley and UCLA professor Ramesh Srinivasan says. As Professor Srinivasan points out, someone clicking on a story about Trump is not “necessarily evidence of their support of him,” but his dominance is undeniable, and his use of social media is politically unprecedented. “It's a win win relationship. And that's partly why Trump says that he likes social media, because it allows him to have a direct pipeline to the people.
“Trump and social media or Big Tech companies are very strange bedfellows.”
Look past the numbers
As much as we crave concrete facts, the information from neat graphs and charts becomes muddied when we ask the important question - how is all this impacting democracy? From the influence of Big Tech itself to how politicians use it, experts warn our democracy is being shaped through international and domestic interference, and the way the technology itself works.
The nature of Big Tech platforms present us with a personalised feed. I see different news and posts to you, and our reliance on this way of receiving information is greater than ever with the demise of print media, dominance of Google in search and increasing use of social media. “In 2016 many people in the United States election, and certainly with Brexit just shortly before that, were quite surprised to realise that the rest of us also get almost all of our news through these algorithmic ‘personalised news feeds’ that we get on Facebook and Amazon, that even show up to us on platforms like Google News or on YouTube itself,” Professor Srinivasan says. He warns that the fact we are not exposed to the same data and stories is “a massive threat for democracy”.
The media’s efforts to keep our interest is nothing new; from television to newspapers, the goal has always been to keep us reading and watching for as long as possible, but Big Tech poses new challenges. “These are blackbox technologies that are highly complex, and we as users are often not familiar with how they work. As a result we sort of think of them as ‘tools that we use’, rather than specific media platforms with particular types of business strategies,” Professor Srinivasan says.
“With such a cacophony of different voices and allegations around what is true or not true, what is considered, fake or not fake, what is considered scientific or illegitimate, that disinformation has kind of become the new normal." He says that the constant question around legitimacy leads us to the platforms most familiar to us that we use every day, such as social media and Google.
“It's not like an open pipe to the world that we experience. When we go on any tech platform, we are experiencing platforms that are making computational decisions around what we see, and how we see it, based on what works for them, not necessarily what works for us, and certainly not what works for the messy experiment that is an electoral democracy or a vote an election.”
As Professor Srinivasan puts it: “Are we the ones googling or are we at the same time being googled?”
These tech platforms were initially designed to be just that - tech platforms. But their huge upward trajectory means they have become so much more, and now are forced to play catch-up with their immense power. Although Professor Srinivasan acknowledges that Google is “a little bit more on top of this”, he says generally speaking there are not many social scientists or political science oriented people working at a global level at companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon. "So when you engineer for society without really deeply understanding the complexities and mess ... you end up doing social engineering, intentionally or - quite likely - unintentionally.”
Trump’s war with Google
The president’s love affair with Big Tech is a complicated one. Although his campaign has been an avid user of social media, he has also regularly attacked it, and of course Google. The president and Fox News have claimed that Google was responsible for him losing millions of votes in the 2016 election, and Republicans losing votes in the 2018 midterms.
Professor Srinivasan says there is no evidence for this claim, and goes so far as to say he thinks a decision was made some time ago “where there was a recognition by Trump and his supporters or his maybe his advisors that setting up some sort of rhetorical war or conflict with Big Tech companies, especially Google, might work to support Trump's political interests, as a so called populist outsider, out of the elites’ world, which we know in many in many senses is not true - but it's working. It might work as a political strategy.”
By doing this, Trump and his administration set up a safety net for someone to blame - "a mechanism by which the public will be even further disoriented.”
This is not to say that Google has no threat to democracy - but does show how politicians can manipulate our lack of knowledge of how it works, and wariness of Big Tech, to form their own narratives.
What will happen in the event of an unclear result?
The 2020 election is seeing huge numbers of mail-in votes due to Covid-19, meaning the results of some races will almost certainly not be clear on election night, or even for the days following it.
“During that period of uncertainty, people will be vulnerable to the spread of rumors, misinformation, and politically-motivated disinformation,” Professor Starbird warns. “Disinformation could come from domestic actors (trying to gain advantage for their preferred candidate) or foreign actors (trying to inflict damage to democracy by reducing our trust in the election process).” She also warns that an unclear result could lead to widespread misleading narratives about voter fraud, particularly on social media.
Combine this with Donald Trump’s continued attacks on polls, reliable media outlets, and virtually anyone that stands in his way, we have a potential democratic danger ahead of us. “There is no question in my mind that if you combine the ambiguity and distress of the pandemic, in the mailing process, and the ambiguity and distrust that I would say has been pushed forward by the President's statements and lack of assurances that he will support a democratic outcome, or a lack of clarity even around what that looks like, we're setting ourselves up for a huge mess along the lines that we have not seen before - even including 2016,” Professor Srinivasan warns.
Although Big Tech companies have taken some steps to control misinformation - for example Twitter highlighting misleading tweets, Facebook clamping down on political ads, congressional hearings for Big Tech - there has bene little fundamental change in how they work in terms of political transparency and accountability.
What needs to happen?
Social media and google “continue to play a massive role in shaping information flows about the election,” Professor Starbird says. “Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have made some progress towards addressing problematic information — including misinformation and disinformation about voting. However, there is certainly more work to be done.
"My strongest advice here is to tune into how information affects us emotionally, because misinformation — and especially disinformation — often leverages our emotional responses to get us to pay attention, absorb its message, and pass it along.”
Attempts to hold these companies accountable are numerous, but what does that actually result in? “I think that the companies have generally had an approach of okay, we understand the problem, we'll hire more people who will take care of it in house, we will develop better AI. But those are fairly vacuous statements, because it's not clear what that means in terms of action. And most importantly, it's not clear where this gives all of us who are not part of the inner circle of these companies have any power over forcing the issue to ensure that they are democratically accountable,” Professor Srinivasan warns.
He has called for a digital Bill of Rights in an attempt to combat these issues. This would allow people to better understand what data is being collected about them, and what about them is influencing their feeds. He also calls for people to have better opportunities to transform and change what their news feeds look like, and to be able to protect certain types of data. "The default shouldn't be blind 24/7, massive surveillance and behavioural manipulation, we can do way better.”
He warns that this combination of disinformation, personalised feeds and company dominance have threatened “the very viability of journalism”, and that it must be addressed. “We have to look at this as a critical issue of protecting democracy and the press, and a free and fair press moving forward.
“As we see ourselves being locked into greater and greater bubbles of addiction, disorientation and dependency, we have a huge opportunity to get things right and ensure that there's true democratic government governance, third party governance of tech platforms to ensure that they support their own business interests, but not at the cost of everybody else.”
