Stanford Politics

The sanctity of our democracy is under attack. Or, at least, it always has been. From the events surrounding the Boston tea party in the late 18th century, to the shutdown of abolitionist newspapers in the early 19th, to the McCarthy era in the mid 20th, evidence of the wax and wane of a key element of our democratic system — the freedom of expression inherent to the West’s electoral society — has always been abound.

With each successive Kremlin-orchestrated election attack these past two years, it has become clear that in the current century, this threat manifests as disinformation. A core tenet of western democracy has always been the integrity and reliability of our press and elections; in other words, the freedom of our collective voice to express and elect as it sees fit. With every Russian attack on a Western democracy — be it against France, the United States, or others — the purity of that voice is further called into question. These actions, manifested as the manufacture and distribution of disinformation among Western citizens, do not directly attack our institutions, but serve to turn their own liberal tools against them, rattling our fundamental values to their core. We must not hide from this painful irony, but instead use it as a prism to understand this threat and, hopefully, to counter it.

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Ironically, it is this century’s remarkable strides towards freedom that set this battlefield. Over the past 30 years, with the rise of the internet and distributed media, for the first time in its history, the West’s longstanding dream of one-citizen, one-voice has come true. Starting at the beginning of this millennium, a stay-at-home mom could blog to the world about child care tips in her spare time (and even make a full-time living doing it). Websites that started out as vent for hobbyists’ opinions on niche news could become industry-leading news sources overnight.

The explosion of internet-enabled technology, and the wealth of opportunity and information that has flowed as a result, has truly democratized the flow of ideas. No longer was news and entertainment content to be controlled by institutional authorities with opaque editorial standards; the internet age was to allow for any voice to be amplified, regardless of its origin. Through platforms like Facebook, not only can decentralized content sources like blogs and YouTube newscasts spread virulently, but through these sites’ comments sections, each post could create a vibrant public forum for discussion on virtually any topic. Those who find an article particularly interesting can share it with their friends instantly, popping up yet another public forum, this time limited to friends and colleagues. This phenomenon could be seen as the first true manifestation of John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas in which opinions and analyses are offered on a level playing field, where ideas are selected by the masses not on the basis of the status or prestige of their speaker but on their merit alone.

This has increasingly become the West’s world over the past few decades with the explosion of internet availability and social media consumption. According to Pew, “A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often.” Compare this to 1995, when 72 percent of Americans got their news via television broadcast.

We have committed to this path; like it or not, internet media consumption is not going away.

But our adversaries have taken notice. Has this move towards democratic flow of ideas made us vulnerable to attack? The events of the past couple years give us a resounding answer: Yes.

The Chinese, Russian, and North Korean militaries have propped up sizable teams of young, agile, and sometimes autonomous cyber agents with a singular mission: use the West’s freedom against it. In the Russian case this is particularly true. The Kremlin employs teams of “weaponized bloggers” that identify key wedge issues to divide particular democracy, produce often-false news stories designed to inflame tensions around that issue, and use a vast array of fake and bought social media accounts (as well as social media platforms’ own advertising systems) to spread it like wildfire. With the virulent nature of social media discourse, such actions may reach hundreds of thousands of people in hours, potentially shifting a national debate in just a few days. In the framework of Mill, they have determined precisely how to game our marketplace of ideas to drive us apart.

This type of battle is not necessarily a new phenomenon; information warfare and disinformation campaigns stretch back to Roman times. However, given the staggering scale and ever-increasing ubiquity of information that the internet has wrought, the threat has a fresh danger to it. Additionally, the existential sting of this issue bites particularly hard. It is precisely because our mode of public discourse has become so free and open, not despite it, that we have become susceptible to this foreign influence.

Now, as one of the great free democracies of the world, we must take stock. We sit at a crossroads of the digital age. The very tools we have developed to cement our society’s liberty of ideas and freedom of expression can now be turned against us. We must decide what our shall response be. Do we decide that the internet is a little too free, that we should perhaps scrutinize content little more strictly at the expense of its liberty? Or do we find another way to mitigate this threat? Either way, the internet is certainly not going away anytime soon, and neither are our adversaries. This is the 21st century’s first great attack on the sanctity of our democratic system; hopefully by understanding the battle, we may find a way to win the war.

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Alex Zaheer is a member of the European Security Undergraduate Network (ESUN). Read ESUN’s weekly column, Cardinal Richelieu, every Friday in Stanford Politics.