It was 31st of January, Dr. Li posted on Weibo that an unknown SARS like virus has infected him, he also detailed how the Wuhan police had accused him of spreading rumors when he told his fellow doctors about the virus in late December. In a matter of weeks, the virus had wrecked havoc in the world.
On May 25, a video emerged on social media of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, which resulted in his death. Protests erupted in the city of Minneapolis and within the next few days the protests had expanded in over 140 US cities and in several countries all over the world.
Unless you are living under a rock, I’m sure you must know of these two incidents. The above events occurred in People’s Republic of China and United States of America and caused worldwide disruption. When a person looks at them together, the impact of Internet today on society is very clear.
Consider the example of the USA. A lot of atrocities on the black community have happened in the recent past but it was only the murder of George Floyd which triggered a nationwide protest. Wide circulation of the video of the brutal assassination online was one of the primary reasons behind it. If the authorities had censored the video, it would have not struck a similar cord.
Internet has provided a gateway of infinite knowledge that is just a few clicks away. This has made the regimes of both democratic and totalitarian nature terrified because it is in their tactics to deceive people by hiding facts and spreading disinformation. Internet changes all that by providing access to information that destroys the fake campaign of political regimes. To curb this power of Internet, states have adopted their old tools of propaganda, mass surveillance and censorship.
Propaganda — tell a lie and tell it often
Many people don’t understand propaganda and those who don’t understand it are the most vulnerable because propaganda is the act of telling lies frequently to the nonintellectual. Adolf Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf, assesses his audience and writes -
Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (…) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (…) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (…) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
This mass of people that Hitler talks about in his book is nothing exclusive to that time or place. Majority of the people in any population are potential targets of propaganda. Inevitably, people and propaganda both moved to the Internet.
Initially, internet was diverse, we used it for exploring facts and alternative views of the world. With advent of social media, things changed. Internet got intrusive, learning what we admire, how we behave to different stimulus and encapsulating us in a filter bubble that only allows positive and criticism free opinion. The primary reason for this was to increase engagement with various internet services so that the tech giants can make more revenue. This change in the working of internet made it a perfect environment for propaganda.
Twitter, a micro-blogging platform has become a very effective propaganda platform among others. Here in my country, two major national political parties run IT cells whose primary role is to trend pro-party hashtags and to combat intellectuals using inflammatory language. This targeted propaganda exists on other platforms too, be it Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. In China, it is Weibo and WeChat. These platforms have played a vital role in elections, for example people demanding basic needs of society like education, health etc are instead diverted by these platforms in a flurry of divisive politics. This takes away any hope of logic and reason in the elections. Memes are used to make serious social problems look like jokes which work well for the younger audience.
People get so lost in propaganda that when they realize the reality of the situation, they trend hashtags of their issues on the same platform that was the one blinding them. Soon the troll army misleads the person who had raised the issue, and the black hole of anti-intellectualism pulls the enlightened mind back into its perennial darkness.
Such is the nature of social media today, where social and psychological lynching of the human mind takes place. Internet, a platform for diverse opinions becomes a capsule of hatred ready to burst on anyone who dare oppose its ideology.
Surveillance — “Big brother is watching you”
As we learned from Hitler’s quote, propaganda applies only to a certain mass of population. But a significant number of people don’t believe in the propaganda and decide to speak against it. What does the machinery of politics has for them? The answer is mass surveillance, the act of looking at online activities of everyone at all times. This system traces people that create any kind of dissent (here is guide by The Hindu to dissent safely) and launches its troll army on them. If need be, hack them to device a criminal case to put them in jail.
Surveillance is an old tool and has existed in distinct forms. Spying, espionage are some examples of it. The surveillance was targeted on a person of interest with a warrant. The unique thing about surveillance in the 21st century is its extent. It is no longer aimed on a person or group of interest; state has deployed the system for the masses and it spares no one. We know this system of surveillance as mass surveillance.
The technology used for surveillance in the 21st century has become creepier than the Orwellian universe. Every person carries a smartphone all the time. This smartphone pings a user’s location hundreds of time every minute. Some states even record phone calls and text messages of all its citizens under various laws (usually the laws are for security). Besides this, they track everything a person browses on the internet by thousands of 3rd parties that they are not even aware of. I describe how this data is exploited in the story Koogle.
Governments often say that they make these laws for mass surveillance to ease the job of law enforcement, Edward Snowden in his book Permanent Record writes in this context:
America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.
You might ask — if mass surveillance is effective? Well, here is one example, USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) ran from 2015 to 2019, a surveillance system that analyzed logs of phone calls and text messages of Americans costing $100 million. It yielded in its time period one significant investigation and twice unique information that wasn’t known already. This system was not first of its kind in America, it traces back to 9/11 attacks and has existed under the Patriot Act as counter-terrorism measure and has only once helped traced a man who had donated a sum of money to a terrorist organization and didn’t himself had any plans of violence.
Censorship — You see what we show you
In Orwell’s book 1984, he describes the censorship in the fictional state of Oceania. Language was being censored to wipe out the very existence of concepts of freedom, democracy and equality. Besides censoring English, a language called Newspeak was being created which meets the ideology of the ruling party. Every day, ministries changed articles, speeches, books, etc to correspond with the advancing campaign of the party.
Censorship is the act of changing, suppressing or prohibiting any kind of content. It has become a popular tool for Governments to stop dissenting ideas from permeating in the society. Suppose a citizen of a totalitarian state (who has never experienced a democracy) connects with a person living in a democratic country. The citizen may realize the freedom that a democratic system can provide. This enlightenment on a large scale can endanger the ruling party of the monolithic state.
This page of Wikipedia tabulates censorship scores given by various organizations against surveillance and censorship. China today has draconian censorship on Internet. It has banned major social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. In China platforms like Weibo, WeChat are popular social media alternatives. The ruling party has a heavy influence on these platforms and controls the content not in its interest. China also bans VPNs that circumvent the censorship.
The Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir sees the worst kind of censorship, Government regularly slows down or even shuts down Internet. The legislative took an important decision on its controversial special status last year. Soon after the decision, the Government did a complete shutdown of Internet and telecom facilities citing it necessary for peace, which inturn barred the general opinion and interest of the population regarding the state.
So what is the ideal Internet?
Internet has transformed, and so has its sophistication. Back in its infancy, it had the freedom that one craves today. It was not a thriving ground for propaganda or a surveillance system for the government to exploit. It was free for anyone to use and hardly censored. It had a diversity of opinion. Snowden in his book explains the Internet when it was new:
Before you recoil, knowing well the toxic madness that infests that hive in our time, understand that for me, when I came to know it, the Internet was a very different thing. It was a friend, and a parent. It was a community without border or limit, one voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and customs. Everyone wore masks, and yet this culture of anonymity-through-polyonymy produced more truth than falsehood, because it was creative and cooperative rather than commercial and competitive. Certainly, there was conflict, but it was outweighed by goodwill and good feelings — the true pioneering spirit.
Internet was good when it had anonymity as a feature. People rarely realize how important anonymity is for them. We expose our most vulnerable selves when no one is surveying us. Would you sing out loud in public, when you know that you don’t sing good? Why do you mute yourself while on a professional video conference? Why do you put curtains on your window? This is only because you act differently when someone looks at you. You are your true self when alone or when anonymous.
Governments and capitalists have changed this very concept of anonymity, they call it suspicious, something that no one needs unless the person is doing something illegal.
Isn’t anonymity suspicious? Who needs it?
If your country is democratic, you probably vote using secret ballots, a system in which the vote is disassociated from the identity of the voter. Now imagine you had to cast your vote without secrecy in front of a political goon, I bet you would vote differently than you would have if the system maintained the secrecy. Anonymity helps an individual to decide with a free mind. It is the basis on which a nation stands. A vote is a decision taken by each stakeholder of the democracy and that vote is anonymous!
Misuse of anonymity is possible, and I am not denying it. From harassing people on social media to building black markets, anonymity has seen all the unwanted use cases. However, the surveillance states being built based on these grounds is absolutely wrong. I don’t believe it is anyway near the actual solution and political regimes are just using this an opportunity for personal gains.
People might have varied opinions on their version of ideal Internet, but no one agreed to propaganda, surveillance or censorship. It is in the human nature to explore novel ideas, concepts and societies and internet is one platform that can offer that. The beginning of the Internet saw people communicate and enabled them to connect without worrying about being discriminated. It was a place to be free in the sense described by Rabindranath Tagore in his poem below:
Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it’s way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever widening thought and action.
In to that heaven of freedom, my father,
LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!
One way of breaking the filter bubble is by using platforms that don’t track and personalize what you see on the internet. You can start by turning off some tracking and personalization in Android phones by going through my short tutorial here. You can also view my detailed analysis of popular communication platforms.
Share your thoughts on this article and also mention what type of internet you desire?
