Social Media between society and democracy. Tech giants, is this how you want History to remember you?

Article and Cover Story by Manuela Andaloro for FocusOn Mag, August 2019.

At the inauguration of Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms. "Facebook!", "WhatsApp!" shouted the crowd.

They were crediting the platforms with their man’s victory, and they aren’t entirely wrong. During the campaign, a conservative pro-business interest group funded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent spread like wildfire in the run-up to the vote. This deluge, according to one Brazilian expert, played a role in Bolsonaro’s victory.

 Bolsonaro’s sympathizers and supporters are part of an increasingly dangerous worldwide trend. A troubling development, now familiar to many, is now evident: social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

Many observers have noted that entrenched authoritarian states, like Russia and China, have gotten very good at manipulating these platforms to marginalize domestic dissidents and destabilize democracies abroad. What has gotten less attention is how authoritarian factions inside democratic states — far-right politicians and parties that are at best indifferent to democratic norms — benefit from the nature of modern social media platforms.

The American 2016 elections, those in Brazil in 2018, the ones in the United Kingdom in 2016 and in Italy in 2017 have demonstrated that social media are a tool that is unfortunately widely used for this type of activity.

Should we perhaps admit a rather painful truth? Has social media, perhaps, become an authoritarian tool in the manner in which they are currently being used?

How the far right gains an advantage using social media

The Journal of Democracy is one of the premier academic venues for analyzing the current state of democratic politics. Its most recent issue features an essay from Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto’s tech-focused Citizen Lab, on the role of social media in modern politics. His conclusion?

“It seems undeniable,” Deibert writes, “that social media must bear some of the blame for the descent into neo-fascism.”

Ten years ago, Deibert’s view — now widely shared among journalists and scholars — would have sounded absurd.

The main characteristic of social media seem to be a vague democratic promise, but the rapid dissemination of information can be used against democracy through information overload and the dissemination of false news that leverage the fears of those who often have few means to understand the reality of the facts.

An always-on, real-time information tsunami creates the perfect environment for the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, rumours, and “leaks.” Unsubstantiated claims and narratives go viral while fact-checking efforts struggle to keep up. Members of the public, including researchers and investigative journalists, may not have the expertise, tools, or time to verify claims. By the time they do, the falsehoods may have already embedded themselves in the collective consciousness.

A recent study found that conservatives were more than four times as likely to share fake news on Facebook as liberals. Another study, from researchers at the University of Oxford, found that conservative users were overwhelmingly more likely to spread “junk news” (defined as outlets that “deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information”).

The University of Oxford’s Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard put out a report last year on the political abuse of social media platforms in 48 countries. They argue that in each of these cases, the use of tools like fake news and trolling undermine the health of democratic regimes and benefit authoritarians. The more anger there is out there, the more support is guaranteed to anti-democratic forces.

"Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence that social media are being used to manipulate and deceive the voting public—and to undermine democracies and degrade public life", they write. "Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike."

 A BuzzFeed analysis found that between 2012 and 2017, seven of the ten most popular articles about German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Facebook were false. Merkel is widely seen as a champion of European liberal values and inclusiveness, one of the major bulwarks against the far-right tide on the continent. Three of the seven false articles in the BuzzFeed list were attacks on her immigration record, all focusing on making immigrants seem like threats to Germany and Merkel unreasonably sympathetic.

Facebook’s role in Brexit and the threat to democracy.

In a recent viral and unmissable TED Talk that has garnered over two million views in just two months the journalist and Pulitzer Prize candidate Carole Cadwalladr has discussed one of the most shocking events in recent times: the very close vote in the United Kingdom in 2016 to leave the European Union. In her speech Carole mentions the "gods of Silicon Valley" for their role in helping authoritarians consolidate their power in different countries.

In her talk, Cadwalladr spoke to those whom she identifies as the chief culprits: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey.

"This technology that you have invented has been amazing but now it's a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth…because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it. This is not democracy: spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash from God knows where. It's subversion and you are accessories to it."

It’s not all bad, is it?

There are places where the democratic promise of social media, which has for example favoured the Arab spring or movements to counteract Orbán in Hungary and also Erdogan in Turkey, is not extinguished but they are the minority in relation to the damage that the social media platforms seem to be inflicting on the liberal order of democracies throughout the world.

Social media right now is functioning as a kind of parody of the classic “marketplace of ideas” mode of the public square. Instead of the best ideas winning out in free debate, there are so many bad ideas that the good ones simply get drowned out.

In August 2018, MIT Technology Review revisited its 2013 “Big Data Will Save Politics” cover, publishing a series of essays examining whether the technology had lived up to its promise. The overwhelming conclusion was that the magazine had been far too naive.

“Today,” editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield writes, “technology feels as likely to destroy politics as to save it.”

M.

(Sources: TED, Umidigital, Uni Oxford, MIT, Vox, Journal of Democracy)

As published in Focus ON’s cover story, August 2019, download original article in Italian here.

Bringing EQ-driven leadership into companies.

Interview by Valeria Camia, journalist, web director Corriere dell'Italianità, to Manuela Andaloro Senior Advisor and Board Member, for Corriere degli Italiani

A successful entrepreneur, an ambassador of gender equality, and a mother, Manuela Andaloro tells her story. 

Business woman Manuela Andaloro has been the CEO of SmartBizHub since 2017. Together with her team, she does management consulting, especially in the field of new technologies and sustainability, working with multinationals and government agencies throughout Europe. Manuela travels often and is active in advocating and raising awareness on diversity, gender equality and on the balance between family and work. She was recently nominated for a major award on gender diversity. For many years, she has been advocating “diversity and inclusion” in companies. Could Manuela picture her current reality when, just a twenty-year-old student at IULM University in Milan, she got her first corporate role as an analyst at ACNielsen, working hard to keep up with her studies?

Manuela has been not only a successful entrepreneur in recent years, for over 17 years she has had important roles in leading financial companies in Europe, since 2012, she’s also a mother. A mother of two small children (4 and 6 years old), in Switzerland, a country in which achieving a balance between family and work is particularly complicated. Maternity leave is granted for only 3 months and fathers are excluded, as opposed to a European average of 6 to 12 months (or even 3 years in Germany) of leave, which in many cases can be shared equally between both parents. If wage parity remains a dream, the same goes for career opportunities, respect for diversity and promotion of social inclusion.

“Finding a balance between career and family is one of the hardest challenges that my husband and I – along with hundreds of parents with careers, I have met over the years – are facing in Swiss society, which in most cases still gives women the role of housekeepers and child carers. This concept is deeply rooted in the culture of this country. I still remember this chat I had with a doctor I had consulted because I felt tired after the birth of my first child and my return to work 5 months later. I remember the doctor asking me why I kept on working. It was shocking. And that was just the beginning. I was shocked again when I went back to work, first part time, then full time. Society in many cases expected me to be mainly a mother”, says Manuela, who considers herself lucky, because “there was still a job for me when my maternity leave was over if you consider that one in seven women in Switzerland loses her job when she becomes a mother.” Not to mention the economic situation, as private nurseries and kindergartens, that can provide more flexible times to allow parents to work, are very expensive and so precluded to many.

To be honest, Manuela actually had some thoughts about giving up her career, or taking a break. It was never easy to leave my children with the babysitter or at the nursery until late, to work and travel even on weekends, and being under the critical eye of society. But Manuela did not give up. She was courageous and aware of the need to break up with an obsolete, individualistic and non-empathic mindset, which does not leave enough space for women and is unable to cope with the new global picture of society and its stakeholders.

— Images, left to right: Manuela Andaloro moderating a FinTech international event in January 2019 in Zurich (credits: British Embassy Bern); speaking about adapting our working cultures to reflect a more modern world and diverse society, June 2019, Amsterdam. (Credits: EWPN, Money 2020); on stage speaking about new role models and leadership, October 2018, London (Credits: PayExpo); Balancing private life and work on a weekend. —

The trump card that can reconcile career and family, says Manuela, is a new type of EQ-driven leadership. “The best leaders of today invest their time and energy in understanding the people they work with and their teams. It’s the EIQ, or emotional intelligence quotient, which experts say has become today more important than IQ and is a better index of success for people, companies and society. This is why we must work to change the old mindset: a new approach will not only favour women but will also foster a type of leadership based on empathic soft skills. In the digital age and its new challenges, women should not be fighting to integrate themselves into a system that has proved to be disastrous as it supports only one model, the alpha personality, mostly very dominant figures. I met women that had old-fashioned leadership styles, not very cooperative and participatory, and men who lead in an inclusive way and pay attention to the social fabric outside and inside the company. Adopting a leadership based on arrogance, blind self-confidence and lack of empathy does not work today, in the face of the probable failure of liberal democracies, the negative influence of social platforms, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence and the associated risks. Both women and men should all work together to transform the mindset of companies (and politics), making room for the new facts on the ground”.

For women, it means they have to learn to believe more in themselves, to not settle for less and to act, without always waiting for the right moment in decisions concerning private and working life – to have a child or to accept a new role of great responsibility that involves changes. “Sacrificing one’s ambitions even before trying is harmful to oneself, to other women, to new generations and to the men that are witnessing this behaviour”.

On 14 June, over half a million women and men across Switzerland joined the demonstrations following the strike, plus all those who participated in a “digital” way. What do you wish for, Manuela? “I wish for strong governmental reforms and independent inspections of companies to assess corporate culture, and diversity within them. And I also expect each of us to raise awareness of issues of vital importance, in each of our daily roles, as mothers, fathers, teachers, workers, leaders. Starting from making our children aware of the importance of equality, inclusion and an open mind-set to face today’s new challenges”.

Valeria Camia with Manuela Andaloro

Manuela Andaloro is a senior professional with over 19 years of executive experience in global roles in financial services, business strategy and digital transformation, having lived in Milan, London and Zurich and worked for firms such as Nielsen, Financial News and UBS. Since 2017, she is the Founder of Swiss-based SmartBizHub, a management consultancy specialising in marketing, positioning, communications, sustainability, future tech and future work. Manuela is a professional speaker, a published author, and an editorial consultant for various leading publications on the topics of finance, social shifts, impact, culture and leadership. She serves as advisory board member of various Swiss and international organizations, and as a board member of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Europe. Manuela is a D&I champion and advocate for EQ- driven leadership, speaks English, Italian, German and Spanish and lives in Zurich with her husband and two children. 

As published in Corriere dell’ Italianita’ cover story, 30 July 2019 view original article in Italian here.