Understand what Digital Populism is and how it has affected our decisions

Political leaders have become heroes. As a supply, they carry speeches with promises capable of saving society from common evils, be them corruption, poverty, unemployment, or any other social injustice. Against them, there is always the figure of the so-called villains, opponents to any social advance and charged with manipulating and delaying the people, affecting their sovereignty with words of deceit and lies.

This scenario, presented as an illustration, constitutes the populist discourse in its typical form. Thus, although it has already permeated various historical contexts, its dissemination via the internet in contemporary times guarantees it attributes and unprecedented elements, which, in turn, give rise to a new category: Digital Populism.

In this post, I will address the main characteristics of this phenomenon, as well as its relation with the Surveillance Capitalism, the spread of Fake News, and the platforms’ content moderation practices on the internet.

Contextualizing Digital Populism

Digital Populism can be defined as a political phenomenon in which the use of platforms and other internet resources are used for the propulsion of anti-democratic populist discourses.

To visualize this phenomenon in practice, just think about the use of Twitter and Facebook platforms by political leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, current Brazilian president, Donald Trump, former U.S. president, and Santiago Abascal, president of the extreme-right Spanish political party Vox. Through social networks, they continuously propagate racist and xenophobic disinformative speeches, which have a high political impact and demonstrate their populist bias mainly through narratives of salvation of society (sometimes implicit) and in dichotomous logics, in which a group or personality becomes a common enemy, and solely responsible for various social issues.

Thus, events such as the invasion of the Capitol in Washington (USA) after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 US presidential elections demonstrate the political impact and manipulative nature that some posts can have. In the case in question, the former president’s tweets culminated in the banning of his Twitter account, while inciting acts of violence and delegitimizing the results of the presidential election – a direct attack to the Democratic State of Law.

Another case to be taken into consideration is regarding the manifestations of President Bolsonaro in face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Antidemocratic characteristics of Digital Populism are observed in the virtual pronouncements of the Brazilian president, such as the creation of ideological opponents – who must be fought – and, thus, the dichotomous character of his speeches. From this, elements such as the non-accountability of the State, informational chaos, and the normalization of contradictions are strengthened.

According to the author Anne Applebaum, in her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, the strategies used in these contexts appropriate social media to create a search for the sensations of unity, harmony, and tradition. Through these lines, such political leaders are able to attract individuals who are uncomfortable with any kind of social complexity and in search of a traditional, conservative order. Together, the media algorithms are harnessed to popularize false discourses that, in turn, offer what their readers want to read. As a result, there is a radicalization of social groups and their representations, increasing the polarization of the networks, and therefore of the users. Let’s look further at these points:

Digital Populism and Surveillance Capitalism

For a presentation or retake on the concept of Surveillance Capitalism, I suggest our post that can be accessed here. In general terms, the phenomenon – which has the Harvad researcher Shoshana Zuboff as an exponent – names an unprecedented logic of accumulation, in which profit is no longer the final object. In this system, data has become the new object of greed, and Big Data a key component. Thus, everyday life itself has become a commercialization strategy, subjecting users to the logic of data collection, extraction, and management that culminates in a behavior control, giving rise to new modes of commodification and monetization.

The relation of this phenomenon with Digital Populism, in turn, is the influence exerted by the way populist discourses are conveyed on the platforms, as well as how users encounter such discourses (in a strategic way), and also who profits from this movement.

Thus, we see that posts which immediately achieve a great repercussion, whether for their controversial or even wrongful character, are encouraged by the plataforms to a continuous sharing, in order to keep reaching different audiences. This flow, in turn, is guided by bubble filters, which increases its capacity to reach interested users and thus reverberate in specific groups. The result of this is a polarized network and users encouraged to hyper-partisanship. On the other side, the platforms profit, as the content is received by interested groups that maintain the popularity and reach of the publications.

Finally, it is possible to afirm that our engagement in virtual content is encouraged by an implicit logic, which takes hold of information ranging from the number of likes and shares we generate for a specific content to the time spent on each post and the number of clicks made on a certain website. We thus conclude that, not by accident, during election periods, for example, our communities of friends on social networks seem to reach a consensus and our feeds echo posts that make us think that some candidates are more or less popular than they actually are. Who has never been startled to see a news story or witness a conversation between strangers that demonstrated how seemingly outdated opinions are actually quite common and still present in society? We can see that the information that reaches us through virtual media only covers a small portion of the whole in which we are inserted.

Digital Populism and Fake News

In the context of popularization of populist discourses, not by chance, Fake News and misinformative content become frequent on networks. Their influence is so remarkable that, in the Brazilian elections of 2018 and US elections of 2016, Fake News reached an unprecedented popularity, having been considered as essential tools for the decision-making of many voters and, according to some studies , as determinants of the election outcome.

To understand the relation between Digital Populism and fake news, it is first necessary to consider that both phenomena, in their original versions – populism and fake news propulsion – are previous to contemporaneity. However, with the adoption of the Internet as a channel, they began to acquire new characteristics, transforming their structure and reach. Among them, virality, strategic allocation and resonance, elements guaranteed by unique factors of the networks, such as the possibility of sending messages by transmission lists, anonymous publications, sharing induced by bubble filters, echo chambers, and by the algorithmic logics of each platform.

Thus, in the context of Digital Populism, the popular appeal is one of the main elements of the speeches of political leaders. Thus, in order to achieve greater support and reach, their dichotomous and controversial speeches cover issues that overlap the political scene, contemplating personal beliefs, emotions, prejudices, and other discursive and psychological resources for the creation of a bond with the electorate, thus building the image of a leader close to the people and contrary to the so-called common enemies.

These statements, often expressed in posts on social networks (spaces in which there is direct communication with individuals, without any intermediation), give rise to the propagation of disinformative content by different agents, ranging from the political leaders themselves to the people. Moreover, as opposition to the mainstream media, many contemporary populist leaders accuse various information channels as sources of Fake News, such as the former President Donald Trump who, from the creation of his Twitter account (in 2015) until January 2020, used the term “Fake News” in 647 tweets, mostly referring to US mainstream media channels such as The New York Times and The Washington Post (you can check the research here). It is observed that the mistrust before the media is a recurring element in the contexts of Digital Populism, which is usually accompanied by disbelief and disaffection towards public institutions, generating a fragile political scenario in which individuals are more likely to believe in false narratives and thus contribute to their reaching a wider audience.

In this panorama, it becomes valid to refer to the author Evgeny Morozov, in Big Tech: the rise of data and the death of politics. For the academic, the popularization of Fake News is a consequence of current society, in which immature democracies persist and practices of all biases are transformed into profitable assets. Thus, the very dissemination of false narratives becomes part of this context, since sharing news with a viral character is lucrative for the platforms and other agents included in this system. With this reflection, in turn, it becomes possible to see a direct relationship with the elements and consequences of Surveillance Capitalism.

Content moderation by platforms

As recently published in our post , content moderation is not just the decision of what will be removed from platforms. Rather, it is any kind of content selection towards users, thus involving different techniques, such as unavailability, restriction, flagging, ranking, among others.

From this, we have that the act made by Twitter to remove the account of former President Donald Trump is an example of content moderation. Therefore, it is clear the relationship between these practices and Digital Populism, considering that large platforms are the main channels for these speeches, being them who decide how we will access them – it may be that the content arrives in our feeds faster, more frequently, through ads and/or suggestions of accounts to follow and news to read… it all depends on how the platforms understand our interactions and interests from their algorithmic logic.

Thus, as platforms have some independence and autonomy in the construction and execution of their moderation practices, they become important agents in the Digital Populism scenario and, undoubtedly, in the Internet governance context. Thus, it is important that, despite the search for audience and reach, they have community policies aimed at a network free of misinformative content, thus covering specific resources to combat Fake News. In addition, an essential attitude for a more democratic moderation is transparency by the platforms in the creation and execution of their practices, especially those that use algorithmic logic, thus facilitating the understanding and improvement of their techniques.

In this context, I remind you that transparency in content moderation is an issue that has already been studied by IRIS in the context of platform community policies and national regulatory trends.

Finally…

Analyzing Digital Populism is to realize how many political speeches have moved in the same direction, which, for its anti-democratic bias, presents an offense to the Democratic State of Law. The use of the internet, in this context, is negatively exploited, becoming an essential tool for the popularization of disinformative and manipulative discourses. Thus, in scenarios where trust in institutions and in politics itself are weakened, users become not only targets, but also transmitters (even if unintentional) of false narratives that strengthen populist leaders.

Given this, the role of the platforms is essential to develop efficient and transparent moderation practices focused on the creation of a democratic interaction space. Finally, it is necessary that the platforms’ users be conscious when using the networks, paying attention to publications that are possibly groundless in truth, as well as those that present mistaken or manipulative discourses, and also how their engagement can be exploited – considering the context of Surveillance Capitalism.

The views and opinions expressed in this blogpost are those of the author. 
Illustration by Freepik Stories.