A Short Discussion of the Internet’s Effect on Politics

The internet and the digital technologies that create cyberspace are transforming society, business, and politics as people respond to new opportunities online and change their behavior accordingly. These effects are reshaping politics and are the result of the nature of the online environment itself, where the combination of technology, information, and instinctive mental processes can unconsciously reshape how people think.

Let 100 Flowers Bloom

A precedent for this shift may come from Johannes Gutenberg and moveable type. Cheap printing changed how people thought about governance, as they could acquire knowledge at lower cost and from a much broader array of sources, giving them new (and often competing) concepts and narratives about society and religion. These new ideas eroded certainty in existing institutions and authority.

This first “knowledge revolution” contributed to centuries of political turmoil. Internet technologies are producing a similar result, but at a faster pace and with broader effect. They erode the legitimacy of existing authority by changing citizens’ expectations and creating competing narratives. The political forces the internet creates mean that representative parliamentary democracy—the nineteenth-century solution to Gutenbergian disruption—is no longer adequate.

The internet is a revolutionary force. It is democratizing, if by this we mean greater participation in politics rather than an endorsement of democratic values. Extremist groups who reject these values are among the beneficiaries of the “democratization” of knowledge and communication. The immediate political effect of the internet has been to energize extremist views and expand the numbers of individuals who hold them. We will need new political mechanisms to manage participation and dissent.

The Demise of Content Mediation

The effect of the internet on the mediation of content is especially pronounced, with a decentralized media displacing the editors and fact-checkers of the past. Social media amplifies the trend toward disintermediation. Facebook has become the primary source of news for much of the U.S. public, but its news is automatically culled and shaped to fit group preferences so information that runs counter to existing beliefs is often excluded. Companies design algorithms to maximize user engagement, and algorithms achieve this by selecting information on the basis of user interests, which can both automatically echo biases and unwittingly reinforce them. One result is a fractured information environment. In the 1960s, former senator Daniel Moynihan said that everyone was entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. The internet changed that.

Some research suggests that the flood of information unleashed by the internet has itself encouraged the spread of conspiracy theories, which offer simple and coherent explanations for complex and unpredictable events. The internet provides the advocates of these theories with a much broader audience and an uncritical media for their dissemination.

Legitimacy and Assent of the Governed

Legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed, who acknowledge authority and assent to its rules (often through voting, which is a symbolic act of affirmation). Consent can be obtained through moral authority, such as religion, or coercion and force (where the governed do not oppose the rulers out of fear), or through some participatory mechanism. Moral authority or expertise can also provide influence, but this influence is most effective when reinforced or “operationalized” by formal institutions. A community where the consent of the governed is insufficient to provide authority will be unstable. The questioning of liberal democracy began before the internet appeared, but the online environment has increased it by allowing competing narratives, unfiltered information, and by reinforcing extremist or conspiratorial views.

The internet changed the requirements for political legitimacy and democratic assent. Representative democracy as currently constructed does not fully meet the expectations the internet has created among citizens for access to information, a voice in decision-making, and direct connections to political leaders. The same pressures that push businesses to become flatter, less hierarchical organizations also press on governance structures. Citizens also expect immediacy and authenticity in messaging, something the previous president understood, but his competitors in the 2016 election did not.

Questioning Progress and “Perfectibility”

The internet accelerates larger political trends affecting the role of the state, the efficacy of liberal democracy in meeting the needs of its citizens, and the authority of values derived from the Enlightenment. The core principles behind Western ideas of “progress” and perfectibility face skepticism, and new information technologies provide an ideal vehicle for this questioning. The effect is to accelerate the decline of the dominant political narrative of democratic progress, a skepticism borne of the tragedies of twentieth century—world wars, nuclear weapons, "scientific socialism"—that undermined the idea that science and individual right would automatically and smoothly improve society. More importantly, if “ the basic social contract underlying democratic societies [is] that all must share in progress,” many Western governments have not held up their end of the bargain. The narrative of democratic progress has been badly tattered both by its own shortcomings and by sustained efforts by authoritarian regimes to undermine it.

Exploiting the Online Environment

Both state and nonstate actors exploit the internet’s political effect. It is the dominant political tool of this century. The features actors exploit are anonymity, the absence of content mediation, the loosening of social inhibitions online, and the internet's global reach and transnational networks. The internet provides new ways for individuals to attach their loyalties and to identify with groups. It disconnects public discussion from physical location and increases the likelihood that community will be defined as those who think like us rather than those with whom we share a location. Before the internet, a person with extreme views may have been isolated in their community. Now, they can go online and find their beliefs reinforced when they find that they are shared by thousands of others. Both Russia and China fear its effect on their own societies, and the Russians have been astute in using it to shape Western, and particularly U.S., views.

Russia, China, Iran, and other authoritarian states recognize the political risks the internet creates but also use it to manipulate knowledge and opinion in their own populations and externally. This is a new kind of conflict whose core is the manipulation of information to produce cognitive effect. Russia has the most advanced doctrine for creating coercive intangible effects using cognitive effect, but its efforts are not the primary cause of damage to Western institutions and their legitimacy. These effects are produced by a perceived fecklessness in democratic governance, which are amplified by the internet.

Cognitive effect—the manipulation of information to change thoughts and behavior by taking advantage of human instincts and mental reflexes—is a key element of internet politics. These include automatic cognitive biases, like when one “leaps to a conclusion.” Russia calls this “reflexive action.” One cognitive bias that internet users have automatically gravitated to is that humans are predisposed to pay more attention to risks and threats. This was a valuable evolutionary attribute since it increased the chances of survival, but the pattern is now inherent in our thought processes. These reflexes create opportunities for disinformation and online manipulation. They are reinforced by social media platforms’ use of algorithms that give preference to information that will capture and hold attention. Sophisticated online actors can take advantage of algorithms and cognitive effect to manipulate their target audience for commercial or political purposes.

Accelerating Instability

The internet creates a dangerous blend of eroding legitimacy, competing narratives, and new avenues for dissent, producing new sources of political instability for all countries. When certain conditions are present—simmering discontent or governance based on coercion more than legitimacy and assent—new technologies and the internet provide a tool for coalescing discontent into revolt if there is a triggering incident or charismatic opposition leaders. Authoritarian regimes, with their brittle relationships with their own citizens, try to suppress the internet’s political effect by restricting access to information, promulgating their own alternative narratives, and creating ubiquitous surveillance regimes, a point discussed at length by the writer Evgeny Morozov. In the near term, these tactics appear effective, and utopian expectations for the internet’s political effect have proved wrong. It remains a question, however, whether such Orwellian approaches merely suppress discontent until there is an explosion or are an effective new form of political and social control. But for now, the more open democratic societies face increased risk.

Hegemony of the Narrative

How cyberspace now actually works and how it changes politics cannot be explained by the idealized multi-stakeholder beliefs of the 1990s. A better explanation for the current state of affairs lies in the work of Antonio Gramsci and his theory of hegemony. The hegemony under consideration here is that of the cyberspace narrative, which distorts our perceptions and justifies the status quo. Gramsci wrote that our consent to a governance system is achieved through ideology—when people believe that existing economic and political conditions are natural and inevitable rather than the creation of groups with a vested interest.

We do not have to accept all of Gramsci's critique to recognize the utility of the concept of narrative. It helps explain how the internet reshapes politics by simultaneously eroding the existing political narrative and offering many competing narratives. This is not the 1919 "marketplace of ideas" since the internet almost entirely removes the cost of entry into the market and can shield ideas from competition due to its reliance on algorithms that limit exposure to opposing views. Societies cannot go back to the previous narrative of democratic governance, but there are common and shared principles that can guide the strengthening of democracy and rebuild the balance between individual rights and creating the public good.

The Western model of governance, based on representative, parliamentary democracy and the Enlightenment norms associated with it may no longer ensure the assent of the governed. Twentieth-century governance models are no longer adequate to meet the expectations of citizens, which have been reshaped by technology and the internet. So far, however, the alternatives to the post-1945 order—untrammeled authoritarian sovereigns or nebulous multi-stakeholder governance—are even less attractive. As with moveable type, political processes must evolve to match the new information environment. Until some new model of governance can accommodate information technologies and their political effect, the principle effect of cyberspace will be to erode democratic governance.

The Need for Experimentation

Policy, law, and practice will need to evolve to take into account these citizen expectations if democratic governments are to renew their legitimacy and authority in what some call the “post-liberal” environment. What a new mechanism for democratic governance and legitimacy will look like is yet unclear, but if this mechanism moves in the direction of greater democratic participation, it will require greater transparency and access and some new form of direct citizen involvement that goes beyond biannual voting. Voting indicates the consent of the governed and is the basis of legitimacy for representative democracy, but it is no longer adequate an adequate means to express assent. Experiments with direct democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century generated uneven results but are a useful precedent that can guide thinking about how to strengthen democracy in the face of the changes brought by the internet.

We want to recognize the immense economic and social benefits the internet has provided. Our assumption has been that access to knowledge and debate provides unquestionable benefit. While this remains true, it must be accompanied by the recognition that the information revolution changes the requirements for legitimacy. The internet puts immense strain on governance. Our political beliefs, processes, and institutions need to evolve to accommodate this.

There is a continually expanding literature on this subject. A select bibliography of relevant works can be found here.

James Andrew Lewis is a senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

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James Andrew Lewis
Senior Vice President; Pritzker Chair; and Director, Strategic Technologies Program