Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states.
And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an unimaginably large polling error, CG won 22% of the first-round vote (and thus made it into the runoff) after polling at 5% just months prior.
A prescient report by Bucharest think tank Export Forum released shortly before the election details the importance of TikTok in Romanian politics — the platform has 9 million users in a nation of roughly 16 million adults — and the impossibly sharp explosion of pro-CG content produced and consumed in the month before the election: “As of November 18, C?lin Georgescu had 92.8 million views, most of which were in last 2 months. By November 22 it had increased by 52 million views.”
This is, simply, not possible without some good old-fashioned “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The report provides examples of exactly that, using what I now believe to be the most important vector of political influence on social media: paying non-political influencers to create targeted content:
there are Romanian influencers with no affinity to politics, i.e. with exclusive content on fashion, makeup, entertainment, who have started to post under a single hashtag, without naming the recipient candidate. The campaign is promoting C?lin Georgescu under the hashtag #echilibrusiverticalitate and is based on the idea of a president who believes in neutrality, verticality, basically recycling Georgescu’s messages from the TikTok campaign.
Recall the recent revelations that prominent right-wing influencers in the US had accepted money from a shadowy media organization that was later revealed to be part of the Russian state apparatus. They were paid “to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.”
“As of November 18, C?lin Georgescu had 92.8 million views, most of which were in last 2 months. By November 22 it had increased by 52 million views”
Does the Romanian election fit the pattern? Absolutely. The Expert Forum report notes that “the theme with the highest visibility pushed by C?lin Georgescu on TikTok in the last two months is peace, more precisely the need for Romania to stop its support to Ukraine in order not to involve Romania in the war.” So now CG heads to a runoff election that it looks like he might actually be able to win.
Control of information environments is a crucial component of 21st century sovereignty. I have been arguing for years that the US should ban TikTok; I had a “Ban TikTok Week” this April — and the same applies to other countries. If anything, smaller countries have even more reason to do so. Western media, understandably if regrettably, focuses on things which Western readers click on. But the worst abuses by social media companies has always come from the rest of the world.
Erin Kissane recently summarized the situation well.
First, whatever happens to social media users in the US, it’s much, much worse almost everywhere else. In 2017, Facebook’s years of active damage to the media landscape and startling neglect in the face of increasingly desperate warnings from experts contributed‚ according to the United Nations, to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar. Sophie Zhang’s whistleblower disclosures reveal the extent of Meta’s longstanding failure to prevent its machinery from being used with impunity to power covert influence campaigns and target journalists and opposition parties all over the world—except in the US, Canada, and parts of Western Europe. Some of Frances Haugen’s disclosures touch on this exceptionalism as well: As of a few years ago, more than 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US and Canada, but the company allocated that massive global userbase only 13% of its content moderation resources.
Does this imply that other countries should ban Meta products, too? That’s what I would do — and it’s obviously what China has already done. But we’ve let things go so far, Facebook and Instagram have become so deeply entrenched in so many economies, that this seems much costlier. This is the exact logic of the “Palo Alto Consensus” I outlined in a New York Times oped back in 2019.
To be clear, I don’t think there’s evidence that China and Russia are colluding on this; it’s possible, but not necessary. TikTok is just doing what tech companies do: they expand recklessly quickly, setting themselves impossible tasks like content moderation at a global scale; they break local laws or share data with autocrats, as best suits them; they lie about user and viewership numbers to prop up a digital advertising house of cards; they prevent independent oversight of basic descriptive facts, let alone the possibility of legitimate democratic control.
But I do think that this kind of targeted pre-election campaign on broadly overlooked spaces like Romanian TikTok is the most plausible and effective vector for foreign influence. And all TikTok would have to do is get a bit sloppy with their content moderation for a brief period of time — lord knows Western social media has done far worse — to make the campaign doubly effective.
In James Pogue’s stunningly reported Vanity Fair article about resurgent Bannonism in the US, he quotes a former Trump administration official about the true nature of contemporary geopolitics: “From a systemic perspective there are really only two things in politics that really mean something…Elon [Musk] buying Twitter…and for someone to emerge who could make the MAGA into something bigger than the man Trump himself.”
Musk lost billions on the Twitter deal — but has been rewarded tenfold after bending the platform towards Trump. Romanian sovereignty is under threat because they do not control their information environment. If digital media had developed gradually and from within individual countries, they might have been able to adapt proper institutions for moderating its effects. But instead, the US, Russia and China have airdropped this society-shattering technology across the globe and told everyone else good luck — we’ve got ads to sell.
And what’s the best argument for not banning TikTok, exactly? You find the guy arguing that it’s giving teenagers anxiety and ruining their attention spans annoying?
{ 20 comments }
MisterMr 11.26.24 at 3:34 pm
The general argument for not banning stuff is freedom of expression, plus the fact that the countries that are more likely to ban or control social media are authoritarian countries (e.g. China or Iran).
This doesn’t meant that the idea is automatically wrong, it might be correct, but then, why not ban say Fox News? When Berlusconi came to power in Italy, he basically owned half of italian TV. Should he have been banned to run in politics? eve if he didn’t he had the power to push consensus towards the group of his choice.
Should all media be controlled “democratically”? This could open another enormous can of worms.
I would be really good to have some clear cut way to avoid clearly politically driven disinformation, but it is really difficult to agre on what is the rule that everyone can accept.
CP Norris 11.26.24 at 7:35 pm
And what’s the best argument for not banning Crooked Timber, exactly? Should we have this debate for every web site?
noone1 11.26.24 at 7:37 pm
You can have your Ministry of Truth and ban everything (and you will try, no doubt), but it won’t help you. Because ordinary people hate you, and everything you stand for. Ordinary people, the proles.
ira 11.26.24 at 8:58 pm
‘If the Nazis were in power today, during the digital revolution, they would rule the world, says Dr. Yaniv Levyatan, an expert in psychological warfare’
https://archive.is/20230628081144/https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2019-06-01/ty-article-magazine/.premium/just-think-what-goebbels-could-have-done-with-facebook/0000017f-db09-df0f-a17f-df4bcaec0000
Alex SL 11.27.24 at 6:46 am
I would not mind banning social media for reasons of negative societal outcomes (although I doubt any government would win that argument in the public sphere).
I do mind banning TikTok because it is owned by a Chinese company but not banning equally corrosive social media because they are owned by an American company (although in a time of increasingly unhinged nationalistic fervour and growing racism, I believe a government would win that argument in the public sphere).
Really, however, I believe that the ship has sailed as far as banning social media is concerned, and the solution should be the usual one: heavy regulation. Demonstrate that you moderate well to keep harassment, libel, and misinformation in check. If you don’t, strike 1 is a fine equal to an entire year of revenue of your network. Strike 2 is being banned from the country. Not going to happen to a US company anywhere except maybe in the EU, but that’s what I would do.
Regarding the specific outcomes in Romania (or other cases where social media made a big impact, like Brexit), it is still the case that nobody can be forced to change their vote even by a coordinated Facebook or TikTok media blitz. If voters decide on what happens to their rights, economy, and foreign policy entirely based on hashtag nonsense hashtag ridiculous claim hashtag hollow slogan, then maybe democracy was a mistake, social media or not.
Doug Muir 11.27.24 at 1:05 pm
Beat me to posting this, Kevin! A couple of thoughts, then.
— Georgescu was and is a nobody. He’s never held elected office. He’s never run a business or an NGO. He’s not a respected writer or lawyer or journalist. He’s a D-list academic turned C-list international bureaucrat who has never done much of anything. (His CV looks moderately impressive if you don’t know what those organizations are. If you do, then you know that “Executive director of the United Nations Global Sustainable Index Institute” is basically “Assistant Regional Manager”.)
— Georgescu was and is a crank. He holds a bunch of views that range from the usual extremist stuff (immigrants are destroying our country!) but actively insane — for instance, that the killing of the Ceausescus in 1989 was actually a western plot to gain control of Romania’s resources. He is of course a climate change denialist, a COVID skeptic, and a pretty open anti-Semite. Oh, and the moon landing was faked. Oh, and soft drinks may contain nano-chips.
— Georgescu had no party, no campaign headquarters, and almost no staff. He has made few public appearances and has never been in any debate. His campaign was almost 100% online.
— Of course the key point about Georgescu is that he’s aggressively pro-Russian: he hates Zelensky, despises Ukraine — “not a real country” — and thinks Putin is a great leader. (Georgescu claims to be very religious, and Putin is the champion of Orthodox Christianity. Putin’s wars against Orthodox Georgia and Ukraine are The West, trying to distract you.) He says that Putin is “full of wisdom”. As to the war, well, we have to sit down and negotiate!
— I say his position on Russia is the key point because Georgescu’s campaign was almost entirely online, and almost entirely driven by bots. TikTok, in particular, allowed its algorithm to be very aggressively gamed; hundreds of thousands of young Romanians opened their phones every morning to reels showing Georgescu as the handsome, hard-working, totally admirable defender of real Romanian values against corrupt elites and foreigners. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also allowed this stuff to flourish.
There was also a coordinated campaign to get Romanian-language influencers to talk about how great Georgescu was. It was widely noted that many of these influencers appeared to be reading from the same scripts.
Why was running these bot farms, and paying these influencers? There’s one pretty obvious answer.
— Note that Romania has, until now, been a very solid and reliable member of NATO and a firm supporter of Ukraine. They’ve provided billions in both military and non-military support, and have also taken in large numbers of Ukrainian refugees. A Georgescu presidency would be a major blow to NATO and Ukraine, and a nontrivial win for Russia.
The second round is the weekend after next, so not a lot of time.
Doug M.
Tm 11.27.24 at 3:53 pm
A German study found that viewers on Tiktok – especially politically uninterested ones – were shown almost exclusively content from the faascist party, in comparison to all other political party content, despite other parties posting a similar volume of content.
We have known for a long time that Social Media algorithms amplify right wing propaganda but this is more frightening than I thought. We are doomed if we can’t stop this propaganda war machine.
Any questions about how Trump could win an election I think are answered by Tiktok, Musk, Sinclair, Murdoch, Bezos, etc. We still don’t grasp how absurdly tilted towards fascism the media landscape has become.
https://bsky.app/profile/andreashoev.bsky.social/post/3lbwcp7pmgc22
Peter Dorman 11.27.24 at 5:32 pm
There is an old socialist trope that technology keeps giving us new powers over nature and ourselves while, due to the private ownership of production, the capacity for social control lags far behind. This is broadly true, IMO, and the effects of social media provide a powerful example. The problem, of course, is that the alternative to private ownership is not yet clear. The socialist solutions, either state or worker ownership, can be OK sometimes but have severe limitations. But in this case, it looks to me like (a) the development and operation of social media for profit, with the emphasis on capturing eyeballs, has been a huge net negative, and (b) external regulation, even when aggressive, is too little, too late.
J-D 11.28.24 at 12:34 am
The people who operate Facebook and Tiktok and other similar platforms make choices and the people who use them also make choices. The operators of the platforms have made terrible choices about how they operate them and the users–many of them–have also made terrible choices about how they use them. The operators’ choices don’t stop being terrible choices because the users also make choices and the users’ choices don’t stop being terrible choices because the operators also make choices.
When people make choices for themselves, sometimes they make bad choices–sometimes they make choices which are both bad for themselves and bad for other people. Sometimes the choices are not merely bad but terrible; perhaps not just sometimes but often. However, the only alternative to people making choices for themselves is some people making the choices for other people. If I make choices for you instead of you making them for yourself, maybe sometimes I will make better choices than you would if left to yourself–better even for you; but then, maybe sometimes I will make terrible choices for you that you would not have made if left to yourself. As a system, people making choices for themselves is better than some people making the choices for others. For example, here where I live in Sydney, the system two centuries ago was that decisions about how the government would run were made for everybody here by officers sent here by the British government for that purpose, and they may sometimes have made better decisions for people than the people would have made if it had been left to them. Obviously there’s no way we can revert to that system, but even if we could revert to that system, it would not be a better system, it would be a worse one.
In the case of Tiktok, if there were some way that Tiktok users could have greater control over what they saw on Tiktok and Tiktok operators less, that would be more democratic and it would be a better system.
hix 11.28.24 at 12:55 am
Social media just needs to be replaced by a public utility.
The AFD candidate pushed in Germany by TikTok is in Chinas pocket. Unlikely to be a coincidence. Not that things look any better on Twitter, Musk is just flooding it with AFD content.
Moz of Yarramulla 11.28.24 at 8:10 am
One question troubling the Australian political class is how exactly to define “social media”. As noted above, is CT social media? Faux News? archive.org?
Australia’s Minister for Communications has been all over the map making definite announcements about the exact effect her Bill will have despite that Bill being conspicuously vague on just about everything other than “under 16s will not be allowed on social media”. Is Youtube social media? Definitely… Not! Will people have to give copies of government ID to TikTok? No, id.gov.au will provide that service. Later: that’s not required. Today: they have to provide an alternative.
Mastodon is an easy recent example of the problem, you can run an instance on a sub-$100 computer using public wifi. IRC is similar but older. 4chan is just a website, but might perhaps count as toxic?
Banning reactively based on behaviour is problematic, partly because of democratic witlag (a problem autocracies don’t have) and partly because of the difficulty of deciding what to ban (again, autocracies don’t have the problem). But mostly for technical reasons – it’s hard to have ubiquitous fast internet (ie, modern society) while also censoring it without spending a lot of resources (China does it, Pakistan et al just cut the whole thing off). But countries like Australia and the USA would grind to a halt if the internet was only local – lots of “it’s in the cloud” is international.
One suspect Trump will be happy to use drone strikes to bring “american greatness” to countries that interfere with shitter, at least while Musk remains co-president. But even minor diplomatic pressure would be enough to cause a lot of countries to cave “be a shame if US credit card companies stopped dealing with your banking system”…
Laban 11.28.24 at 2:14 pm
It strikes me that the political ramifications of the internet/social media will be almost as hefty as those of printing.
Is it my imagination, or is the current German (and UK, only our base is much lower) industrial decline reminiscent of the Flagellant movement? “We have sinned, the world will burn, we must suffer”? I know NS2 did half the damage, but the German Greens …
Alex SL 11.28.24 at 9:16 pm
J-D,
Of course the behaviour of the likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, et al. is atrocious. But I always argue for the responsibility of the consumer and voter, because, ultimately, this is fairly easy: when presented with a blatant lie, one could recognise it as implausible, and when presented with hatred, one could reject it in disgust. Some people do so, and that means it is possible. Take Fox News an analogy: some people watch it all day. Whenever I see a clip, I find it hard to believe that anybody takes it seriously and doesn’t immediately recognise everybody involved as charlatans. More generally, if somebody tells me “x are so evil, they will do y”, and then x don’t even try to do y, I lose trust in the person who made the claim. Why don’t those who uncritically swallow the lies have a responsibility as allegedly adults who are trusted to manage their own lives?
Moz,
That is why I wrote that the ship has sailed. However, the EU could do something and get away with it.
Laban,
I am not in Germany anymore, so I don’t know what exactly you are referring to. From my relatives I am getting the impression that the main problem is infrastructure (e.g., rail) falling apart because of under-investment which is because significant parts of the political class are more afraid of the debt or tax rises that would be required to invest than they are of everything slowly falling apart.
But even if your characterisation of the Greens is more than the usual propaganda, have you considered that an alternative is that somebody bona fide believes that our current economic model isn’t sustainable? “We will suffer if we go on like this”.
J-D 11.28.24 at 11:46 pm
I’m not saying they aren’t. I’m not arguing against the responsibility of the consumer and voter. I observed that everybody makes choices; if there’s such a thing as responsibility, then it follows that everybody is responsible for the choices they make. But if everybody’s responsible for their own choices and nobody responsible for anybody else’s choices, then the question for me is: What am I going to do about that?
Similarly, if you hold that adult consumers and voters are responsible for the choices they are making, the question for you is: What are you going to do about that? For example, if some people watch Fox News all day and don’t reject its blatantly implausible lies, how does holding them responsible for that help you decide what you’re going to do about it?
Alex SL 11.29.24 at 7:12 am
Similarly, if you hold that adult consumers and voters are responsible for the choices they are making, the question for you is: What are you going to do about that? For example, if some people watch Fox News all day and don’t reject its blatantly implausible lies, how does holding them responsible for that help you decide what you’re going to do about it?
Quite frankly, I would turn that around: if, say, my brother is responsible for accepting nonsense, I can try to talk him out of it. But if he is just a passive box that Zuckerberg and the right-wing press pour lies into, then what am I going to do about it? I have no power to influence Zuckerberg or the editor-in-chief of a newspaper, and that was that.
Laban 11.29.24 at 10:59 am
While I agree about the infrastructure. I was thinking more about the German car, steel and chemical industries (including fertilisers), all of which seem to be suffering.
This is very bad news as Germany is pretty much Europe’s only world-class manufacturing and exporting economy.
Thyssen Krupp steel have just announced a 40% cut in their workforce, citing high energy prices and cheap Asian imports. I wonder what made energy costs so high?
And yet, if you look at the World Steel Association site, Japan, with no indigenous energy sources, is producing steel at twice the German volume. So there’s something in Japan very different to Germany.
Salem 11.29.24 at 11:24 am
Liberal democracy rests on the premise that the government may not “control the information environment. Going further, SCOTUS stated in US v Stevens:
Strictly speaking, this is merely a statement of American constitutional law. But really, it’s a fundamental principle of what it means to live in a free society. There’s no need for us to come up with special extra reasons for why the categorical benefits of free speech should extend to organisations Kevin Munger doesn’t like.
hix 11.29.24 at 4:21 pm
One can (and should) construct a government utility in a way that would still give a load voice to rather disgusting positions I do not share. The question is just how much you push which content on people who did not actively chose that content. Might even be sufficient to still allow for profit overlays, as long as they interface with the base setting non-profit system.
I’d like to have a concrete example for a policy by the Greens that is damaging German industry. Because, to my knowledge, non exist. On the contrary, there are quite big exceptions for industrial users from externality taxation, and the greens did not have to get convinced of those from other parties.
As far as it is not doing fine on the short term, that is on a rejection of anti-cyclical spending “Schuldenbremse” and the particular bad interpretation by the FDP. On a per capita basis, the utter incompetence (and unwillingness to give people qualified to help any job, much less one paid according to their qualification doing so like me) regarding refugee integration is not helping.
J-D 11.30.24 at 7:24 am
When I’m considering the question ‘What should I do?’ it obviously makes sense for me to think about what kind of influence I have the power to exert. It’s true that I have no power to influence the controllers of the media. But I also have no power to influence most of the consumers of the media. You may have some power to influence your brother (or then again you may not; how would I know?), but I certainly have none.
J-D 11.30.24 at 7:26 am
I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it is true then there’s never been liberal democracy, because the government has always controlled the information environment.
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