Hacking into hearts and minds
By: Lautaro N. Rubbi
Tags: Technology, Politics, Social Media, Information, Fake News

In a dialogue from George Orwell’s iconic 1984, O’Brien asks Winston, the main character, about the number of fingers he sees on his raised hand, and then asks him how many fingers he would see if the omnipotent Big Brother said the number was another. Our reality is getting dangerously close to this fiction. We live in the age of disputed truths, where disinformation plays a permanent role. The old proverb of the X-Files series “I want to believe”, today finds in YouTube videos the possibility to believe anything.

“Happy are those who believe” because on the Internet they can find everything they need to defend their theories.

In this context, according to a report published by Freedom House in 2019, we should be worried about the advance of political manipulation of reality. Governments around the world are intensifying their efforts to manipulate information on social networks, undermining the foundations of democracy. The use of paid commentators and automated campaigns to spread government propaganda was pioneered in China and Russia but has now become global. The task is made easier by the overload of data, connection, and exposure in the virtual world, reinforced during the recent international pandemic and the consequences of social isolation.

During the Cold War, an active radio and television campaign that exposed the virtues of the liberal political system in the face of repression by autocratic systems helped to gain followers around the world, even within the most repressive regimes. In The Dictators’ Learning Curve, W. Dobson points out that some learned the lesson from that lost competition. Today, several of them not only have their own Internet but have also decided to be more active in bringing to public discussion the contradictions inherent in liberal democracies. Virtual agoras are now key to alienating Western hearts and destroying the foundations of the system from within.

If we add to this the growing capacity to collect data on society, the panorama becomes increasingly complex for civil liberties. In this context, the debates on the privacy of conversations on the multiple platforms for virtual meetings that took center stage during this pandemic take on special relevance, as do the tensions between the main poles of world power over the installation of fifth-generation mobile networks and their possible consequences.

Democracy, Robert Dahl noted in 1971, is based on fact-based understanding. In a world of limited access, the first thing to do was to expand it, increasing the opportunities to know and affirm the choice that best suits the interests of each individual. In light of the 2020 situation, he was an idealist. The expansion of access and the generation of information led to divergences in sources that tended to atomize identities and reinforce an understanding of reality based on plausible, though erroneous or distorted, facts. Today emotions and beliefs are a more important standard for truth than the facts themselves. The problem is that the former are more related to charismatic leaderships, both in autocracies and democracies, which are sustained primarily by repressive behavior or solely electoral legitimacy.

In 1948, taking the Soviet system as a model, Orwell already conjectured about a world where truth was manipulated to the point that reality lacked verifiable facts.

“He who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past”

He never imagined that ultra-connectivity and social networking would make it easier. Hacking into hearts and minds has never been easier.