Search the archive.

Just two and a half years into Khan’s tenure, there is time for things to improve — or, more ominously, to deteriorate further — particularly if Biden is reelected next year and she stays on.

“They haven’t lost all that many cases,” Kovacic observed, striking a generous tone, and adding, “Morale improves a lot if you start winning.”

Herbert J., Ben V. & Dorothy Willie Professor, University of Iowa College of Law. "Antitrust and the Patent System: A Reexamination" (2015). All Faculty Scholarship. 1820. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1820

F. Comparative Advantage Legal policy makers must make decisions with the tools and information available to them, even if they are not perfect. At this time our knowledge about the relationship between antitrust law and traditional competition, while imperfect, is much more complete than our knowledge about the relationship between patent law and innovation—and more particularly, about the impact of particular patent doctrines on innovation. In that setting it is not irrational to condemn a practice that is highly likely to decrease welfare via collusion or exclusion in the shorter run based on nothing but an unsupported hunch that it might also increase innovation.

Herbert J., Ben V. & Dorothy Willie Professor, University of Iowa College of Law. "Antitrust and the Patent System: A Reexamination" (2015). All Faculty Scholarship. 1820. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1820

Antitrust policy responded to a half century of overreaching by developing extremely strict rules for establishing competitive harm. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to this day, antitrust has undergone a revolution in thinking that has disciplined and narrowed its focus and made its rules more consistent with its underlying goals. Patent law would benefit significantly from such a process—one that reflects consumer interests more strongly and that takes our economic knowledge of innovation and its relationship to competition and economic growth more fully into account. Today, the one enormous advantage that antitrust law has over patent law is that it confronts the economic question of impact on competition directly and explicitly, often dismissing complaints when harm to competition cannot be shown. Patent law needs to take a page from this playbook.

We write in praise of market disrupters—firms that shake up the status quo, threaten incumbent firms, and sometimes transform entire industries. Through this process, which Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction,” disruptive firms promote economic growth and bring the benefits of new technologies and new business practices and business models to consumers.

We focus on the impact of antitrust policy—known globally as competition policy—on innovation.1 Competition policy seeks to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process by which new ideas are transformed into realized consumer benefits. In this fundamental way, competition spurs innovation. The productivity and growth literature teach us that innovation is the primary driver of rising standards of living over time, so promoting innovation through effective competition policy is likely to be very consequential for economic growth and welfare.

The rise of advanced artificial intelligence tools will act as “first-class fire accelerator” for anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech firms, Germany’s top antitrust official warned Wednesday.

The warning from Andreas Mundt, head of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, comes as AI leaders such as Microsoft, Google and Nvidia face mounting scrutiny from watchdogs in the US and the European Union over concerns that they wield too much power over the market.

Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and scattered genetics. Usually this results from: natural disasters, resource depletion, economic meltdown, disease, poor information flow and corruption. But we’re luckier than our predecessors because we command a technology that no one else possessed: a rapid communication network that finds its highest expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which the net has vastly reduced the threat of societal collapse. Epidemics can be deflected by telepresence One of our more dire prospects for collapse is an infectious-disease epidemic. Viral and bacterial epidemics precipitated the fall of the Golden Age of Athens, the Roman Empire and most of the empires of the Native Americans. The internet can be our key to survival because the ability to work telepresently can inhibit microbial transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic, businesses can keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working from home. This can reduce host density below the tipping point required for an epidemic. If we are well prepared when an epidemic arrives, we can fluidly shift into a self-quarantined society in which microbes fail due to host scarcity. Whatever the social ills of isolation, they are worse for the microbes than for us. The internet will predict natural disasters We are witnessing the downfall of slow central control in the media: news stories are increasingly becoming user-generated nets of up-to-the-minute information. During the recent California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their neighbourhoods were in danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned with the fate of celebrity mansions, so Californians changed their tack: they uploaded geotagged mobile-phone pictures, updated Facebook statuses and tweeted. The balance tipped: the internet carried news about the fire more quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this grass-roots, decentralised scheme, there were embedded reporters on every block, and the news shockwave kept ahead of the fire. This head start could provide the extra hours that save us. If the Pompeiians had had the internet in 79AD, they could have easily marched 10km to safety, well ahead of the pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius. If the Indian Ocean had the Pacific’s networked tsunami-warning system, South-East Asia would look quite different today. Discoveries are retained and shared Historically, critical information has required constant rediscovery. Collections of learning -- from the library at Alexandria to the entire Minoan civilisation -- have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the wrecking ball of natural disaster. Knowledge is hard won but easily lost. And information that survives often does not spread. Consider smallpox inoculation: this was under way in India, China and Africa centuries before it made its way to Europe. By the time the idea reached North America, native civilisations who needed it had already collapsed. The net solved the problem. New discoveries catch on immediately; information spreads widely. In this way, societies can optimally ratchet up, using the latest bricks of knowledge in their fortification against risk. Tyranny is mitigated Censorship of ideas was a familiar spectre in the last century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves and copying machines in the USSR, Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq and elsewhere. In many cases, such as Lysenko’s agricultural despotism in the USSR, it directly contributed to the collapse of the nation. Historically, a more successful strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech -- and the internet allows this in a natural way. It democratises the flow of information by offering access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Some posts are full of doctoring and dishonesty whereas others strive for independence and impartiality -- but all are available to us to sift through. Given the attempts by some governments to build firewalls, it’s clear that this benefit of the net requires constant vigilance. Human capital is vastly increased Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the world’s population is involved. We need expand human capital. Most of the world not have access to the education afforded a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not. This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s knowledge -- from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will serve us well when we confront existential threats we’ve never imagined before. Energy expenditure is reduced Societal collapse can often be understood in terms of an energy budget: when energy spend outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. This has taken the form of deforestation or soil erosion; currently, the worry involves fossil-fuel depletion. The internet addresses the energy problem with a natural ease. Consider the massive energy savings inherent in the shift from paper to electrons -- as seen in the transition from the post to email. Ecommerce reduces the need to drive long distances to purchase products. Delivery trucks are more eco-friendly than individuals driving around, not least because of tight packaging and optimisation algorithms for driving routes. Of course, there are energy costs to the banks of computers that underpin the internet -- but these costs are less than the wood, coal and oil that would be expended for the same quantity of information flow. The tangle of events that triggers societal collapse can be complex, and there are several threats the net does not address. But vast, networked communication can be an antidote to several of the most deadly diseases threatening civilisation. The next time your coworker laments internet addiction, the banality of tweeting or the decline of face-to-face conversation, you may want to suggest that the net may just be the technology that saves us.

Recently, analysts have argued that emerging technologies with military applications may undermine nuclear stability (see here, here, and here), but the logic of these arguments is debatable and overlooks a more straightforward reason why new technology might cause nuclear conflict: by upending the existing balance of power among nuclear-armed states. This latter concern is more probable and dangerous and demands an immediate policy response. For more than 70 years, the world has avoided major power conflict, and many attribute this era of peace to nuclear weapons. In situations of mutually assured destruction (MAD), neither side has an incentive to start a conflict because doing so will only result in its own annihilation. The key to this model of deterrence is the maintenance of secure second-strike capabilities—the ability to absorb an enemy nuclear attack and respond with a devastating counterattack. Recently analysts have begun to worry, however, that new strategic military technologies may make it possible for a state to conduct a successful first strike on an enemy. For example, Chinese colleagues have complained to me in Track II dialogues that the United States may decide to launch a sophisticated cyberattack against Chinese nuclear command and control, essentially turning off China’s nuclear forces. Then, Washington will follow up with a massive strike with conventional cruise and hypersonic missiles to destroy China’s nuclear weapons. Finally, if any Chinese forces happen to survive, the United States can simply mop up China’s ragged retaliatory strike with advanced missile defenses. China will be disarmed and US nuclear weapons will still be sitting on the shelf, untouched. If the United States, or any other state acquires such a first-strike capability, then the logic of MAD would be undermined. Washington may be tempted to launch a nuclear first strike. Or China may choose instead to use its nuclear weapons early in a conflict before they can be wiped out—the so-called “use ‘em or lose ‘em” problem. According to this logic, therefore, the appropriate policy response would be to ban outright or control any new weapon systems that might threaten second-strike capabilities. This way of thinking about new technology and stability, however, is open to question. Would any US president truly decide to launch a massive, bolt-out-of-the-blue nuclear attack because he or she thought s/he could get away with it? And why does it make sense for the country in the inferior position, in this case China, to intentionally start a nuclear war that it will almost certainly lose? More important, this conceptualization of how new technology affects stability is too narrow, focused exclusively on how new military technologies might be used against nuclear forces directly. Rather, we should think more broadly about how new technology might affect global politics, and, for this, it is helpful to turn to scholarly international relations theory. The dominant theory of the causes of war in the academy is the “bargaining model of war.” This theory identifies rapid shifts in the balance of power as a primary cause of conflict. International politics often presents states with conflicts that they can settle through peaceful bargaining, but when bargaining breaks down, war results. Shifts in the balance of power are problematic because they undermine effective bargaining. After all, why agree to a deal today if your bargaining position will be stronger tomorrow? And, a clear understanding of the military balance of power can contribute to peace. (Why start a war you are likely to lose?) But shifts in the balance of power muddy understandings of which states have the advantage. You may see where this is going. New technologies threaten to create potentially destabilizing shifts in the balance of power. For decades, stability in Europe and Asia has been supported by US military power. In recent years, however, the balance of power in Asia has begun to shift, as China has increased its military capabilities. Already, Beijing has become more assertive in the region, claiming contested territory in the South China Sea. And the results of Russia’s military modernization have been on full display in its ongoing intervention in Ukraine. Moreover, China may have the lead over the United States in emerging technologies that could be decisive for the future of military acquisitions and warfare, including 3D printing, hypersonic missiles, quantum computing, 5G wireless connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI). And Russian President Vladimir Putin is building new unmanned vehicles while ominously declaring, “Whoever leads in AI will rule the world.” If China or Russia are able to incorporate new technologies into their militaries before the United States, then this could lead to the kind of rapid shift in the balance of power that often causes war. If Beijing believes emerging technologies provide it with a newfound, local military advantage over the United States, for example, it may be more willing than previously to initiate conflict over Taiwan. And if Putin thinks new tech has strengthened his hand, he may be more tempted to launch a Ukraine-style invasion of a NATO member. Either scenario could bring these nuclear powers into direct conflict with the United States, and once nuclear armed states are at war, there is an inherent risk of nuclear conflict through limited nuclear war strategies, nuclear brinkmanship, or simple accident or inadvertent escalation. This framing of the problem leads to a different set of policy implications. The concern is not simply technologies that threaten to undermine nuclear second-strike capabilities directly, but, rather, any technologies that can result in a meaningful shift in the broader balance of power. And the solution is not to preserve second-strike capabilities, but to preserve prevailing power balances more broadly. When it comes to new technology, this means that the United States should seek to maintain an innovation edge. Washington should also work with other states, including its nuclear-armed rivals, to develop a new set of arms control and nonproliferation agreements and export controls to deny these newer and potentially destabilizing technologies to potentially hostile states. These are no easy tasks, but the consequences of Washington losing the race for technological superiority to its autocratic challengers just might mean nuclear Armageddon.

While digital authoritarianism can enhance regime durability and national power, it also introduces deep-seated vulnerabilities, eight of which are considered below. Significantly, digital authoritarians may find themselves in a state of constant contest with other regime types, trapped in cycles of overreach and backlash, and prone to strategic miscalculations that pull them into interstate conflict. The current turn to digital authoritarianism therefore also has broader implications for international peace and stability.

Brittle Legitimacy

But the national security case against breaking up Big Tech is not just weak; it is backward. Far from competing with China, many big technology companies are operating in the country, and their growing entanglements there create vulnerabilities for the United States by exposing its firms to espionage and economic coercion. At home, market concentration in the technology sector also means less competition and therefore less innovation, which threatens to leave the United States in a worse position to compete with foreign rivals. Rather than threatening to undermine national security, breaking up and regulating Big Tech is necessary to protect the United States’ democratic freedoms and preserve its ability to compete with and defend against new great-power rivals. DESTINATION: CHINA Competition with China will define U.S. national security conversations for decades to come, and Americans need to think carefully about the role technology will play in this increasingly competitive environment. But to claim that the likes of Amazon and Google are helping counter China’s technological and geopolitical rise simply because they are American companies makes little sense. Almost all big U.S. technology companies have extensive operations in China today. Google announced plans for an AI research center in Beijing in 2017 and is exploring a partnership with the Chinese Internet behemoth Tencent. Microsoft is expanding its data centers in China and has recently built an entire operating system, Windows 10 China Government Edition, for the Chinese government. Amazon’s cloud service in China is second in popularity only to that of its Chinese counterpart, Alibaba. Apple famously designs its phones in California but manufactures them in China. Facebook, notably, does not operate in China—but not for lack of trying. The company repeatedly attempted to gain access to the Chinese market only to be blocked by Chinese government officials. Merely operating in China may seem harmless. Yet according to scholars, U.S. government officials, and even American business associations, any U.S. technology company working in China could very well be supporting the Chinese state and the expansion of digital authoritarianism. In the course of their operations in the country, U.S. companies routinely interact with Chinese companies, some of which are run or partly owned by the state. Those that are not still have informal ties to state and Communist Party officials and face strong incentives to behave as the state wishes even without direct pressure from the government. Because the Chinese market and the state are intertwined in this way, Chinese companies that partner with foreign ones are highly likely to pass along operational and technological developments to the Chinese government and military, including in ways that could advance Beijing’s emerging surveillance state and accelerate its ability to spread its model of digital authoritarianism around the world. These challenges are particularly clear in the case of AI, as commercial innovations in that field can also have military implications. Under Beijing’s doctrine of “civil-military fusion,” Chinese researchers and private companies are working ever more closely with the government and the military, which means that technological innovations that may have originated with a foreign company active in China can find their way to supporting the People’s Liberation Army. “If you’re working in China,” Ashton Carter, a former U.S. defense secretary, has said, “you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.” In addition to widely known concerns about Chinese espionage and surveillance, integration with the Chinese market also opens Big Tech—and the United States—to pressure from China, which can use that influence to hurt U.S. interests. Scholars refer to this tactic—turning economic interdependence into political leverage—by a variety of terms, including “geoeconomics,” “reverse entanglement,” and “weaponized interdependence.” Whatever it’s called, China has a long track record of doing it, across countries and industries. To retaliate against South Korea’s adoption of a U.S. missile defense system in 2017, China blocked Chinese travel agencies from offering trips to the country. And after the dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China temporarily blocked imports from Norway. To avoid offending Chinese officials and potentially losing access to the country’s large market, companies are adapting their behavior even outside China’s borders. Hollywood studios have been accused of rewriting scripts and editing scenes for that purpose: choosing to blow up the Taj Mahal instead of the Great Wall of China in the movie Pixels, according to Reuters, and replacing China with North Korea as the main adversary in the 2012 remake of Red Dawn, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the NBA basketball team the Houston Rockets, tweeted in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; soon thereafter, he deleted the post. In the days that followed, the owner of the Rockets wrote that Morey did “NOT speak” for the team, and the NBA said it was “regrettable” that Morey’s views had “deeply offended many of our friends in China.” (After a public outcry, the NBA clarified that it would not censor or fire Morey.) A year earlier, Mercedes-Benz had posted a quote from the Dalai Lama on Instagram. After an online backlash in China, the automaker quickly erased the quote, and its parent company, Daimler, said that the post had contained an “erroneous message” and had “hurt the feelings of people” in China. The People’s Daily, China’s largest newspaper, later branded Mercedes-Benz as an “enemy of the people.” Such conduct by Western companies illustrates a broader point: they act based on their commercial interests, not in the name of abstract democratic principles or for the cause of U.S. national security. The same is true when these companies try to influence government policy. The potential stakes are high. The U.S. Department of Commerce, for instance, has the power to set export restrictions on some sensitive technologies, including AI; those restrictions may be important from a national security standpoint, even if they negatively affect some companies’ bottom lines. Yet the dominant ideology among corporate lawyers today holds that the sole aim of managers is to maximize shareholder profits, and corporate lobbyists are thus likely to advocate public policies that support those profits even if they run counter to U.S. national interests. Practically all U.S. companies active in China are subject to such pressures to one degree or another, and how to address that predicament is another question altogether. But the size and dominance of American technology companies are part of the problem. As the U.S. technology sector becomes more concentrated and the few players in it become more dependent on the Chinese market for consumers and profits, these firms—and, by extension, the United States—become more vulnerable to pressure from Beijing. Antimonopoly policies could help remedy this problem: in a fractured market with many players, the sheer number of firms would all but guarantee that some would build supply chains that circumvented China, or build their products wholly in the United States, or simply choose not to engage in the Chinese market—whether because of idiosyncratic preferences, competitive dynamics, product differentiation, higher costs, or other factors. Consider another industry whose structure resembles that of Big Tech: Hollywood. Like the technology industry, today’s entertainment sector consists of a handful of studios that are increasingly dominant at the box office and able to pressure theaters to give their content preferential treatment. If these big, integrated companies comply with Chinese censors out of a concern for market access, then U.S. consumers will not see content that offends the Chinese government. By contrast, in a system with a large number of small studios and competitive distribution channels, many companies would lack the size, scope, or desire to cater to the Chinese market, let alone be dependent on it. Nor would they have the power or scale to lock out new competitors through vertical integration. The result would be a market in which Americans had a range of content choices, including entertainment that might not accord with the views of foreign censors. Of course, in theory, it is possible that a small number of big U.S. technology firms, each with monopoly-like power, might be so profitable as to have no need for the Chinese market, whereas small companies with razor-thin profit margins might depend more on that market for consumers and profits. But this hypothesis has not been borne out. The current technology sector is already highly concentrated, and yet today’s technology companies are not forsaking the Chinese market; instead, they are desperate to expand their business there. As they do so, they will likely be subject to the same pressures bearing down on Hollywood, the NBA, Mercedes, and other entities that want to operate in China. Companies such as Amazon and Google, which both produce their own content and distribute it through their platforms, may over time be tempted to make that content palatable to Chinese censors. And because those firms have immense market power within the United States, American consumers will be left with no serious, scalable alternatives. A more competitive technology sector, with many smaller players, would also mitigate the ill effects of lobbying, for much the same reasons. Fewer companies would be dependent on the Chinese market, and those that were would be differentiated enough to often end up on different sides of policy debates. Their lobbying efforts would be less likely to cut in a single direction and thus less likely to capture government. THE VIRTUE OF MONOPOLY Big Tech’s market dominance, some will argue, has benefits: free of constant worries about vicious competition, technology giants can focus on the big questions. They have the time and resources to invest copiously in cutting-edge research, where success is rare but the potential payoff—for technological innovation and thus for U.S. competitiveness and national security—is massive. Whether or not they say it explicitly, those who want to protect Big Tech from antitrust laws and other regulations are advocating a “national champions” model—a system in which the state shields a few select big companies from competition, allowing them to spend on research and development. But there is strong evidence that this approach is imperfect, at times even counterproductive. As the legal scholar Tim Wu has noted, it is usually competition, not consolidation, that fosters innovation. Competitors have to find ways to differentiate themselves in order to survive and expand. Large, protected firms become lethargic, are slow to innovate, and rest on their laurels. Recall the race for supremacy in the electronics industry that played out between the United States and Japan in the 1980s. Japan, according to Wu, chose to protect its national champions, giving direct government support to such powerhouses as NEC, Panasonic, and Toshiba. The United States took the opposite tack. Its largest electronics firm at the time, IBM, came under antitrust scrutiny by U.S. authorities, and the ensuing decade-long legal battle discouraged the company from engaging in conduct that might run afoul of antitrust laws. That created the space for a variety of other hardware and software companies, among them Apple, Lotus, and Microsoft, to flourish. Competition led to innovation and the creation of some of the most forward-looking companies of the era. National champions also have an incentive to hide breakthroughs that might undermine their market power. Bell Labs, one of the pillars of AT&T’s telecommunications empire, has long been celebrated for its role as an “ideas factory.” But Bell Labs and AT&T also suppressed innovations that threatened their business model. Starting in the 1930s, for example, AT&T’s management sat on recording inventions that could have been used for answering machines, for fear this innovation might jeopardize the use of the telephone. Skeptics might argue that this time is different—that today’s next-generation technologies are so resource-intensive that smaller companies in a competitive environment couldn’t afford the necessary investments. But even if broken up and regulated, Big Tech’s main players would have considerable money left to spend on AI, robotics, quantum computing, and other next-generation technologies. Facebook would still have billions of users without Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon’s platform would still have enormous market power in online sales even if it wasn’t allowed to produce its own products. Whatever resource constraints did arise could be offset by greater public investment in R & D. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued, such government spending has historically been a significant driver of innovation; the Internet, for example, began as a U.S. Defense Department network. There is no reason the government could not play the same role today. Unlike research by national-champion firms, research funded by public investment would not be tied to the profit motive. It could therefore cover a wider range of subjects, extend to basic research that does not have immediate or foreseeable commercial applications, and include research that might challenge the incumbency and business models of existing companies. Public research could also de-emphasize areas of inquiry that may be profitable but are socially undesirable. For many of the biggest technology companies, surveillance, personalized targeting, and the eliciting of particular behavioral responses lie at the heart of their business models, which means that their efforts to innovate are geared in no trivial way toward improving those tactics. An authoritarian country may see those as valuable public goals, but it is not at all clear why a free and democratic society should. Public investment in R & D also has the potential to spread the benefits of technology, innovation, and industry throughout the United States. At present, much of the country’s technological and innovative prowess is concentrated in a few hubs—the most prominent being Northern California, Seattle, and Boston. This is not surprising, as unlike the government, technology companies have no reason to want to spread development evenly. Amazon’s competition to decide the location of its second headquarters is a good example. After inviting countless pitches from cities across the country and much public attention, the company settled on New York and Washington, D.C.—two cities that hardly need an economic boost. Public investment, as the economists Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson have argued, could remedy these geographic imbalances and spur successful economies in dozens of midsize cities all over the country, with spillover benefits for their regions. Mountains of data are needed to improve AI’s precision and accuracy, and some might think that only Big Tech can collect and handle data in such vast quantities. But this need not be the case, either. The United States could create a public data commons with data collected from a variety of government sources (and regulate it with strict rules about personal privacy), for use by businesses, local governments, and nonprofits to train machines. Any new data would be fed back into the data commons, allowing the quality and quantity of the information to improve over time. Alternatively, the government could require technology companies to make their data available in interoperable formats. If those companies effectively have monopoly power over data, then they could be regulated as monopolies—with public access to the data sets as a condition for their continued protection as monopolies. No legal obstacles stand in the way of these options, and both would enable innovation and expand the number of players working on important technological developments. SQUEEZING THE GOVERNMENT For the moment, such public initiatives exist only as proposals. Big technology companies have considerable market power, and the U.S. government increasingly relies on their services, including to run its national security apparatus. Technology is, of course, a crucial aspect of warfare, and firms such as Amazon and Microsoft have contracts to provide cloud services to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. These technology companies are fast becoming part of the United States’ defense industrial base—the collection of industries that are indispensable for U.S. military equipment. As they do so, the curse of monopoly capitalism that already affects the country’s overconsolidated defense sector—causing higher costs, lower quality, reduced innovation, and even corruption and fraud—will likely grow worse. To see the challenge ahead, consider the present state of the U.S. weapons industry, which is already remarkably uncompetitive. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office found that 67 percent of 183 contracts for major weapons systems did not have a competitive bidding process. Almost half the contracts went to one of five companies—a stunning testament to the dominance of a handful of firms. And in 2018, the Defense Department released a report on the military’s supply chain that listed numerous items for which only one or two domestic companies (and in some cases none) produced the essential goods. Perhaps most striking of all, the report found that the United States no longer had the capacity to build submarines on a rapid timetable because of single suppliers and declining competition. Unsurprisingly, as Frank Kendall, a former head of acquisitions at the Pentagon, has pointed out, large defense contractors “are not hesitant to use this power for corporate advantage.” In a recent article in The American Conservative, the researchers Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce argue that contractors with de facto monopoly at the heart of their business models threaten national security. They write that one such contractor, TransDigm Group, buys up companies that supply the government with rare but essential airplane parts and then hikes up the prices, effectively holding the government “hostage.” They also point to L3 Technologies, a defense contractor with ambitions, in the words of its one-time CEO, to become “the Home Depot of the defense industry.” According to Stoller and Kunce, L3’s de facto monopoly over certain products means that it continues to receive lucrative government contracts even after it admitted in the settlement of a 2015 civil fraud lawsuit that it had knowingly supplied defective weapons sights to U.S. forces. As technology becomes more integral to the future of U.S. national security, Big Tech’s market power will likely lead to much the same problems. Technology behemoths will amass defense contracts, and the Pentagon will be locked into a state of dependence, just as it is currently with large defense contractors. Instead of healthy innovation, the government will have created what Michael Chertoff, a former homeland security secretary, has called a “technological monoculture,” which is unwieldy and vulnerable to outside attack. The cost to taxpayers will increase, whether due to higher prices or fraud and corruption, and much of their money—funding that could have been available for innovation—will become monopoly profits for technology executives and shareholders. A WAY FORWARD That technology companies do not want to be broken up is unsurprising. They are profitable, growing, and powerful. Nor is it a mystery why they try to play the trump card of invoking national security in their defense. But even from the viewpoint of national security, the case for shielding Big Tech from competition is weak. Technology companies are not competing with China so much as integrating with it, at significant risk to U.S. interests.In the United States, competition and public investment in R & D, not today’s consolidated technology sector, will provide the best path forward to innovation. Policymakers should embrace proposals to break up and regulate big technology companies: to unwind mergers and acquisitions such as Facebook’s decision to buy the social networking and messaging services Instagram and WhatsApp. They should require technology platforms such as Amazon to separate from businesses that operate on their platforms. They should apply nondiscrimination principles drawn from public utilities and common carrier laws to digital platforms. And they should adopt stringent privacy regulations. In this era of great-power competition, the best way to remain competitive and innovative is through market competition, smart regulations, and public spending on R & D. Breaking up Big Tech won’t threaten national security; it will bolster it.

André O. Laplume, Saurav Pathak, and Emanuel Xavier-Oliveira, School of Business and Economics, Michigan Technological University, USA, Science Direct: “The politics of intellectual property rights regimes: An empirical study of new technology use in entrepreneurship,” Technovation: Volume 34, Issue 12, December 2014, Pages 807-816

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497214001011

National Security and Resilience. Concentration at critical points in the AI technology stack raises significant concerns for national security and resilience. With very few chip companies, the possibility that one foundry could be shut down due to a pandemic, weather event, war, or other emergency is significant.20 Such an event would cause supply chain challenges for both military and non-military critical infrastructure. Concentration in cloud computing raises risks too: An oligopoly of cloud providers, integrated up and down the AI stack and without interoperability between them, gives rise to substantial software supply-chain concerns. If a cloud provider is attacked in a cyberattack, or if a cloud provider’s warehouse is affected by a severe weather event, or even if an employee makes a simple mistake, dozens of AI applications—and the operations, services, and websites that depend on them—could shut down for hours, days, or longer.21 Just as concerning is that faulty foundation models, if offered by only one firm, can lead to widespread error that could be catastrophic in emergency situations.

Economic Inequality. Like concentrated power in other industries, an AI oligopoly is likely to further economic inequality. Concentration means that a small number of firms will capture the vast majority of the sector’s profits. And while it is too early to tell exactly how the introduction of AI at scale will change labor markets, it could very well create a “bifurcated job market that squeezes out the middle class.”

Americans today are fast reawakening to one of the essential truths of human society – that political economics is the art of governing how people compete with, and exercise power upon, one another. Competition itself is inevitable. What people can control is whether corporations and markets are structured to promote the liberty and well being of the individual, the ability of citizens to make wise decisions within democratic institutions, and the security and prosperity of the nation. For two centuries, Americans were masters of engineering competition policy to achieve these ends. Citizens used antimonopoly laws and policies to make themselves the most equal and free people in the world, and the most prosperous, innovative, and powerful. They did this even as new technologies and industrial systems repeatedly revolutionized social and economic structures. But four decades ago the United States radically altered how we think about and enforce competition policy. Rather than aim to promote liberty, democracy, community, and technological advance, policymakers in the early 1980s said we should focus on efficiency alone. The ultimate result? Today Americans face the gravest set of domestic threats to our liberty and democracy since the age of the plutocrats, perhaps since the Civil War. The speed at which Americans are awakening to the crisis of concentrated power is encouraging. It was only a little more than three years ago that this Subcommittee held a hearing on the wisdom of focusing foremost on efficiency in enforcing antitrust law. Most who testified that day denied that America faces any monopoly problem at all. Today, by contrast, the great majority of Americans want some sort of action against bigness. And enforcers and legislators are rising to the challenge. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have brought lawsuits against Google and Facebook. And in the most democratic antimonopoly action in American history, the attorneys general from 49 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and Guam have launched investigations of Google and Facebook, and many of those states have joined to file three additional far-reaching lawsuits. On top of that are the smart and timely efforts to update, strengthen, and refine America’s antitrust laws, here in the Senate – notably with Senator Klobuchar’s important new bill – in the House, and in states across the nation. The people of the United States see the threat, and they are relearning how to use the sword of antimonopoly. The people of the United States aim to keep our democracy. Our task today is to begin to map out Stage Two of this once-a-century battle to restore peoples control over the U.S. political economy. I congratulate the subcommittee for recognizing the need to look beyond the immediate threats toward the ultimate goal, which is to establish a rule of law that can effectively protect American liberty, democracy, and prosperity for the long haul of the 21st century. I congratulate the subcommittee also for placing antitrust law within the larger framework of competition policy. The members are clearly breaking free of the intellectual and technical constraints placed on antimonopoly a generation ago by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and other pro-monopolist thinkers. They are relearning that the purpose of American state is not only to protect the people from all dangerous concentrations of power abroad, but to break or neutralize all dangerous concentrations of power right here at home. To help us map our path on this next stage of the fight, I will focus today on what I believe are the five main challenges we must meet if we are to succeed. These are: • Understand the ways in which monopoly threatens democracy. • Remember the original purposes of competition policy. • Relearn how to use nondiscrimination rules and bright line rules – the two main tools of antimonopoly. • Create a coherent U.S. competition policy, by reintegrating antitrust with trade policy, patent policy, and national security industrial policy. • Understand the political, economic, and intellectual opportunity before us. I) UNDERSTAND HOW MONOPOLY THREATENS DEMOCRACY Our first task if we are to establish a smart and effective Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century is to understand exactly how monopoly threatens American liberty and democracy. American democracy is founded on the assumption of a rough equality of personal independence, well-being, and opportunity. Such rough equality is what emboldens citizens to speak freely and to work together to address common problems, both of which are essential to any true democracy. Monopolization therefore threatens democracy in two ways. First and most obvious is that it results in concentration of power and control in the hands of the few. Second, and more insidiously, concentration of power and control suppresses exactly the sort of debate and actions necessary to fight monopoly. Over the last decade, Americans have begun to recognize the role that monopolization has played in concentrating dangerous amounts of power and control in the hands of the few. Thanks to the work of the economist John Kwoka, and others, we now know that prices for many basic services and goods have gone up dramatically in recent decades, despite the fact that the main focus of antitrust enforcement has long been to drive prices lower. Thanks to the work of the economist Jose Azar, and others, we also know that over this same period, monopolists have driven down American wages by 20% or more in most industries and regions, and often by more than 30%. Americans also have developed a better understanding of how concentration of power in retail, services, and farming contributes to this concentration of wealth. A good example here is the immense amount of power now held by two families – the Waltons and the Bezos. Until 1981, U.S. policy aimed to distribute the ownership of America’s retail stores among tens of thousands of families. Today, as a direct result of changes in competition policy under Reagan, the Waltons and the Bezos dominate vast swaths of America’s retail business. Both families have also concentrated enormous wealth in their own hands – to an extent that makes a mockery of the promises of democracy. The Walton family, for instance, is richer than 150 million Americans put together. The equation here is simple. Rising prices plus falling wages plus less opportunity to build independent business equals ever greater inequality, of wealth and hence of power. But recognizing the link between monopolization and inequality is only the first step towards addressing the political threats posed by concentration of power and control. And it is not even the most important step. Indeed, monopolization poses two other threats to American liberty and democracy that are far more immediate, yet far less well studied and understood. Autocracy within the corporate system. The basic problem here derives from the combination of monopoly control over some particular economic activity, and a license for the monopolist to discriminate in how it treats those under its sway. In some cases, the monopolist discriminates in the delivery of some essential service. In others it discriminates in the delivery of some essential product or component. In both instances, the ability to discriminate in the delivery of a product or service empowers the dominant corporation to exercise more or less direct political control over the dependent corporation or person, who do and say whatever is necessary to retain access to the market. There is nothing new about how the combination of monopolization and the license to discriminate, nor about dominant corporations using this combination to control dependent corporations and people. At the height of the power of the Wall Street “plutocracy” of the early 20th Century, when much of the political power of the United States was concentrated in the hands of a small clique of bankers led by J.P. Morgan, President Woodrow Wilson wrote: “Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”1 We should be absolutely clear about what monopolization plus discrimination means. Whenever a person’s property is not secure, whenever that person’s property can be taken or crushed at will, it means rule of law itself has collapsed. Or rather, it means that the whim of the monopolist has become the law of the land. The most immediate political result of such a system of arbitrary control is silence. Those who are harmed and who should criticize the monopolist do not speak up, for fear of retribution. A good example of such arbitrary rule is the semiconductor industry. In recent months, a shortage of semiconductors has paralyzed much of the international production system, including assembly lines of General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen. The main reason for the shortage is that a single corporation - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation – was allowed to capture a monopoly over the manufacture of high-end semiconductors. TSMC then chose not to invest in sufficient new capacity to serve all potential customers. It can be far more profitable, after all, simply to pit existing customers against one another in competition for capacity on TSMC’s foundries, and to charge them more for their products. And what do the executives at the manufacturers thus harmed do in response? Rather than decry the concentration of power by the monopolist TSMC, or the failure of TSMC to invest in sufficient capacity, even the largest of manufacturers remain silent in public, while begging for supply in private. They do so because they are afraid TSMC will respond by inflicting yet more pain on their enterprises, such as by arbitrarily shifting already scarce supplies to their rivals. But let’s be clear. This is no isolated instance. We see this same fear to speak out in almost every corner of the American political economy today. This includes companies that depend on Amazon to get to market, including even the most powerful of book publishers. We see the same fear among the companies that depend on Google and Facebook to get to market, including even the most powerful of news publishers. We see the same fear among the companies that depend on Amazon and Google and Apple to distribute their films and music and television shows, including even the most powerful producers of art and entertainment. The breakdown of information systems. Democracy also depends on the ability of citizens to communicate freely with one another, and to deliberate with one another based on a roughly similar understanding of facts. But the combination of monopolization and discrimination is swiftly breaking down the systems Americans have long used to gather, process, share, and debate news and information with one another. Two threats especially stand out. The first is the way in which dominant intermediaries – Google and Facebook foremost – are exploiting their chokeholds to divert advertising into their own vaults, away from independent publishers. This diversion of tens of billions of dollars has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of journalism positions across the nation. And it has resulted in the bankrupting of thousands of important publications, and the financial degradation of thousands more. The overall result is that less and less well-reported, well-edited, trustworthy information is generated in the United States as a whole, and within each individual region of the United States specifically. Open Markets was among the very first organizations to warn of this threat, in public events in the summer of 20162 and 2018.3 Since then, this threat has received a lot of attention, from policymakers and law enforcers around the world, including recent public and private antitrust lawsuits in the United States. There is some good news here. Senator Klobuchar just yesterday introduced important legislation that would provide news publishers with breathing room, while Americans work out a permanent fix to the problem. But thus far, however, no legislature has developed a mature plan to rebuild a truly open and competitive market for news and information that is not – to at some degree – ultimately regulated, manipulated, and taxed by Google and Facebook. The second threat derives from that combination of monopolization and discrimination. Here the basic problem is that Google and Facebook increasingly deliver different news, information, and advertising – including highly targeted propaganda and misinformation – to each individual citizen. Google and Facebook say that such targeted information serves the interests of each individual citizen. Whether that is true or not, the ultimate political result is an atomization of the public, to a degree that makes it ever more difficult for citizens to engage with one another through constructive political interaction, and to identify and master the great problems of our time.

The concentration of wealth and power has helped transform and radicalize electoral politics. As in the Gilded Age, a disaffected and declining middle class has come to support radically anti-corporate and nationalist candidates, catering to a discontent that transcends party lines. A renewed economic nationalism around the world blames immigrant workers, foreign products, or elite conspiracies for the diminishment of the middle class. There is widespread anger at big business and how they treat customers, especially in concentrated or monopolized industries like insurance, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and other insensitive behemoths. Many fear Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and their power over not just commerce, but over politics, the news, and our private information. What we must realize is that, once again, we face what Louis Brandeis called the “Curse of Bigness,” which, as he warned, represents a profound threat to democracy itself. What else can one say about a time when we simply accept that industry will have far greater influence over elections and lawmaking than mere citizens? When the American pharmaceutical industry can raise prices by thousands of percent, confident that government will do little or nothing? Where the middle class has no apparent influence on policies like health insurance, taxes, working conditions, housing, or other matters that determine how life is really lived? We must now face questions that have been ignored for more than a generation. Are extreme levels of industrial concentration actually compatible with the premise of rough equality among citizens, industrial freedom, or democracy itself? Can we create broad-based wealth and a sense of entrepreneurial opportunity in an economy dominated by monopolists? Is there just too much concentrated private power in too few hands, with too much influence over government and our lives? The questions, I think, answer themselves. The main goal of this short volume is to see how the classic antidote to bigness—the antitrust and other antimonopoly laws—might be recovered and updated to face the challenges of our times. For roughly a century, the antitrust law served in practice and theory as an antimonopoly code that sought to limit excessive industrial concentration and to police monopoly conduct. By the midpoint of the last century, antitrust became widely understood in the Western world as a necessary part of a functioning democracy, as an ultimate check on private power. Yet over the span of a generation, the law has shrunk to a shadow of itself, and somehow ceased to have a decisive opinion on the core concern of monopoly. The law that the Supreme Court once called a “comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition” no longer condemns monopoly, but has grown ambivalent, and sometimes even celebrates the monopolist —as if the “anti” in “antitrust” has been discarded. Most of what follows can be understood to center on the recovery of one principle: that in enacting and repeatedly fortifying the antitrust laws the United States made a critical, indeed Constitutional choice in industrial and national policy. After a period of intense national debate, including a presidential election in 1912 where economic policy was a central issue, the nation rejected a monopolized economy and chose repeatedly over the decades to preserve its tradition of an open and competitive market. The goal of antitrust law must be understood as respecting that choice. Or as Louis Brandeis, the great prophet of a decentralized economy, put it, the antitrust laws answered a question: “Shall the industrial policy of America be that of competition or that of monopoly?” What happened? The law is currently suffering from an overindulgence in the ideas first popularized by Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty. Forty years ago, the famed Robert Pitofsky warned that it is “bad history, bad policy, and bad law to exclude certain political values in interpreting the antitrust laws.” He was right. Antitrust has fallen into hibernation before as ideologies have shifted, only to come roaring back to meet the needs of the age. To deliver on its mandate, American antitrust needs both to return to its broader goals and upgrade its capacities. It needs better tools to assess new forms of market power, to assess macroeconomic arguments, and to take seriously the link between industrial concentration and political influence. It needs to take advantage of all that economics and other social sciences have to offer. It needs stronger remedies, including a return to breakups, that are designed with the broader goals of antitrust in mind. Finally, it needs to put courts back in the business of policing what Brandeis termed as conduct meant to “suppress or even destroy competition. The alternative is not appealing. Over the twentieth century, nations that failed to control private power and attend to the economic needs of their citizens faced the rise of strongmen who promised their citizens a more immediate deliverance from economic woes. The rise of a paramount leader of government who partners with monopolized industry has an indelible association with fascism and authoritarianism. It is true that antitrust alone will not cure the curse of bigness or eliminate the excesses of private power. But it strikes at the root, and getting the engines of the law restarted is an important part of dealing with a problem that has reached Constitutional dimensions. As such, this book is far less radical than it might be. It is actually a call for a middle path, to control economic structure before it controls us. It does not see antitrust as degraded beyond redemption, nor label its practitioners as unprofessional or untalented. It claims, rather, that the law has lost sight of its goals and has subsequently failed in its core mission. The initiatives I propose may combine to go far toward reinvigorating antitrust in our era, restoring it as a check on private power as necessary in a functioning democracy.

In the present context, the phrase “democratic deficit” will be used to describe democracy-related harm, that is, harm to democratic processes that arises in a certain context.55 Democratic deficits in digital markets can be attributed to several factors, such as the dynamics of digital markets, the intermediary function of platforms, and the digital platforms’ power over data—a feature of digital markets that has also been keeping the antitrust world on its toes.56 While this cannot easily be separated, different types of democratic deficits appear to emerge online. On one hand, there is the spreading of misinformation that concerns an election or a particular political debate. Parties that can have an interest in such behavior include foreign powers that want to interfere with democratic processes,57 or political campaigns that want to spread wrong information about opponents or situations to influence voters and public sentiment.58

On the other hand, there is the use of political micro-targeting by political campaigns themselves to sway voters in their favor, in particular by using the methods of targeted advertising that digital platforms make available.59 In the digital sphere, this type of practice is rendered possible by the large troves of user data that communication, social media, and other digital platforms have at their disposal and that they use to “influence voters through the direct transmission of stimuli, which are formed based on the preferences and characteristics of an individual.”60 Through the application of “sophisticated psychological and technological methods,” individual users are then targeted with personalized political content.61 Both of these scenarios make use of the dynamics of online communication platforms that favor outrageous, “clickbait” content that evokes an emotional response from users, rather than constructively contributing to political debates by setting out a variety of (often more moderate) views.62 And both of these scenarios lead to the realization that the data capabilities in the hands of Big Tech platforms63 are important sources for the democratic deficits arising online. For these and further reasons, the European Parliament is debating, at the time of writing, whether one needs to put a halt to targeted ads as are currently offered by several Big Tech companies,64 while the European Commission has just published draft legislation to provide transparency on how users are targeted with political ads.65

Today, for the first time since 2001, there are more autocracies than democracies in the world. The number of electoral and liberal democracies dropped from 55 percent of all countries at its peak in 2010 to only 48 percent in 2019.1 This decline in the number of liberal democracies is [wrecking]crippling the U.S-led liberal world order, weakening America’s post-Cold War hegemony, and shifting power to authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia, leading Fareed Zakaria to claim that “American hegemony died.”2 It seems that illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes are on the rise all across the globe. Even in the United States, President Donald Trump favored a new kind of hegemony — an illiberal one.3 This phenomenon can be explained by many factors, such as the rise of xenophobic populist movements in reaction to immigration, cultural change, the decline in job and economic security after the 2008 financial crisis, the opposition to globalization, and the loss of sovereignty.4 For authoritarian regimes, the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America is proof that “the liberal idea has outlived its purpose,” as the public has turned against immigration, open borders, and multiculturalism.5 Recent elections worldwide reflect a deep groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment that can easily be mobilized by extremist political parties and candidates.6 In this essay, we highlight the role of U.S. social media platforms in the decline of liberal democracies and the rise of illiberal democracies and autocratic regimes across the world. Previous studies have examined different aspects of the impact of social media platforms on states and regimes but have usually done this in a siloed way — for example, narrowly focusing on the correlation between social media and the rise of populism, or on the influence of social media in Latin America and in the U.S. 2016 elections.7 Sarah Kreps posed a broader research question regarding the different effects of social media platforms in democracies and non-democracies.8 This essay contributes to this body of research by taking an even wider view. We describe the multifaceted impact of American social media platforms in different countries and seek to generalize and categorize this impact by offering an innovative explanation for it. These generalizations and categorizations help to explain why different countries experience the impact of social media in different ways and with varying degrees of intensity. They can also help policymakers to predict what may occur in similar countries where the impact is not yet clear and help them to take preliminary steps to avoid the same phenomenon. We begin by reviewing social media platforms, their knowledge power (the power they gained by accumulating vast amounts of data about people and turning it into knowledge), and their potential as a liberating mechanism, before examining what went wrong in the last decade. This is followed by a discussion of the variable impacts of social media on the political systems in different states. We explore why the effect varies between different democratic states — for example, in Brazil compared to the United States — as well as between different authoritarian states — i.e., why it has bolstered Russia’s regime while fueling a revolution in Egypt. We suggest that social media’s impact depends mainly on three political actors: domestic opposition, external forces, and the governing regime. By examining how these three actors use social media while considering variations in state capacity and political regime type, a causal model emerges in which there are four different effects of social media: weakening, intensifying, radicalizing, and destabilizing. We further examine these disparate effects by examining four case studies, each representing a different combination of state capacity (weak vs. strong) and regime type (democratic vs. authoritarian). We argue that, contrary to the optimistic promise of social media platforms at the beginning of the millennium, it seems that they are having a weakening effect on strong democratic regimes, an intensifying effect on strong authoritarian regimes, a radicalizing effect on weak democratic regimes, and a destabilizing effect on weak authoritarian ones. We conclude by presenting the implications of our analysis for the future of the international system. The Promise of Social Media Of the seven most popular social media platforms, Facebook owns four: Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Together with YouTube, which is owned by Google, these are the five leading social media platforms not based in China. The most successful social media platform in “grabbing, holding, and processing human attention” is WeChat,9 a China-based application that “encompasses almost every aspect of human life.”10 It is a “one-stop-shop” model that led Facebook to try to consolidate its sub-companies (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram) into one giant application.11 Optimists have seen social media platforms as an expression of the liberalizing ethos of the internet: tools for empowering citizens, enabling economic opportunities, increasing freedom of expression, spreading liberal ideas, and providing an alternative communication platform for dissidents.12 This positive view was espoused by some of the founders of U.S. social media platforms and can be traced back to John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”13 which was popular at the time when these companies were established in Silicon Valley. Although these corporations started out politically neutral, some have moved in recent years toward publicly challenging governments.14 For example, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has talked about replacing the “old” social infrastructure of the state, “which opposes the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration,”15 with a new global community.16 Zuckerberg also stated: “In many ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.”17 Google’s Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt wrote about the game-changing implications of the internet for politics. They predicted that governments “will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority.”18 Social media platforms have the power to strengthen democracies by echoing public opinion. Clay Shirky argues that social media can help to increase freedom and change people’s political views by exposing them to other opinions echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues.19 At the beginning of the millennium, social media platforms were credited with shifting power from authoritarian regimes to ordinary people seeking freedom and social justice.20 Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking wrote in 2018 that social media platforms “illuminated the shadowy crimes through which dictators had long clung to power and offered up a powerful new means of grassroots mobilization.”21 Manuel Castells describes social media as “a mobilizing force” that can “topple an entrenched regime if everybody would come together.”22 These platforms can compensate for the disadvantages of undisciplined groups by reducing coordination costs while increasing shared awareness.23 Indeed, social media platforms played a role in the 2009 civil revolt in Moldova, dubbed “the first Facebook revolution”; the 2009 unrest in Iran, called “the first Twitter revolution”; the 2011 Russian “almost-revolution”; and the first wave of Arab social unrest in 2011, when “the Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt” demonstrated “the liberating power of social media.”24 However, according to Singer and Brooking, these internet-enabled democratic movements “represented a high-water mark” that was followed by “a countering wave of authoritarianism using social media itself, woven into a pushback of repression, censorship and even violence.”25 The use of social media has no single preordained outcome. These platforms cannot “bring the world closer together,” as Facebook’s mission states,26 and help connect only democracy-loving people. As Zeynep Tufekci notes, they are also “connecting white supremacists, who can now assemble far more effectively or radical Buddhist monks in Myanmar, who now have much more potent tools for spreading incitement to ethnic cleansing.”27 Social media can be used to support incumbent politicians within a country or to help external authoritarian powers to disseminate propaganda and disrupt the democratic transfer of power through elections in other countries.28 It is also used by populists who pose a fundamental challenge to neoliberal ideology, spreading untruth and stirring outrage that affects voters’ judgment and fuels partisanship.29 The different actors using social media platforms, whether for good purposes or bad, are exploiting the unprecedented concentration of knowledge power that these platforms have amassed over the past few years. The Knowledge Power of Social Media In recent years, social media platforms have gained “knowledge power” derived from the vast amounts of data that they have collected and marshaled.30 According to Susan Strange, such power includes “what is believed or known and the channels by which these beliefs, ideas and knowledge are communicated, or confined.” This kind of power lies as much in the capacity to deny knowledge as in the power to convey it.31 The knowledge power of social media platforms may take many forms. Facebook, for example, knows more about a person than the government does.32 In 2002, Google discovered it could use the collateral data that it collects to profile users based on their characteristics and interests and then match advertisements to individual users.33 Over the years, Google and Facebook have sold more ads by reducing user privacy and gaining more access to a person’s data.34 In the competition for what Shoshana Zuboff called “surveillance capitalism” revenue,35 the advantage goes to firms that can acquire vast and varied data streams. Therefore, social media platforms are expanding both the scope of surveillance (migrating from the virtual world into the real world of automobile dashboard) and the depth of the surveillance (accumulating data on individuals’ personalities, moods, and emotions). In addition to using knowledge power to profile and micro-target their users to sell more ads, Facebook also uses its algorithms to anticipate human behavior and create “prediction products” that make people easier to manipulate.36 This power was allegedly harnessed to reshape popular perceptions of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union.37 Another aspect of social media’s knowledge power is reflected in its significant role in today’s media industry. The perceived trustworthiness of the news media in democratic states has given these states advantages over non-democratic ones. Lucie Greene calls Facebook, Twitter, and Google “the Fifth Estate” because they have replaced the traditional news outlets as the main places where people go to get their news.38 They now have the power to shape public life, including what content is produced, where audiences go, and what news and information citizens see.39 In 2012, Facebook declared that its mission is to expand and strengthen relationships between people and to help expose people to a greater number of diverse perspectives.40 Instead, only a few years later, the opposite has happened. Facebook has became one of the sources for divisions among people.41 This can be attributed to two main factors: the “filter bubble phenomenon” and the rise of fake news. Facebook’s algorithms tend to reinforce a “filter bubble” that shields people from dissenting information and only delivers content that confirms their views.42 Social media platforms are part of the digital “attention economy,” which focuses on the interplay between money and attention. The more people are engaged with the content on social media and are exposed to commercial ads, the more it generates income for these platforms. In order to keep people engaged, Facebook tends to expose them to the most popular posts and to confrontational and inflammatory news items that tend to make people more extreme in their views.43 Facebook encourages society to self-segregate into like-minded communities, which increases the distance between groups with opposing views, causing more polarization.44 YouTube’s recommendation algorithm typically recommends videos that echo the political bias of its viewers and what they choose to view, and feeds them videos containing viewpoints that are more extreme than the ones they currently hold.45 Fake news has gained prevalence in recent years due to the rising role of social media platforms as news outlets, where content can be produced and relayed among users with no significant third-party filtering, fact-checking, or editorial judgment. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow define fake news as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers.”46 This type of news is widespread because it is cheaper to produce than precise reporting and because consumers enjoy partisan news. A fake story shared by millions becomes “real” because people believe that if it’s going viral, it must be true. The most inflammatory materials will travel the farthest and fastest. False stories on Twitter, for example, spread significantly faster and more broadly than true ones, and wider distribution of false stories also makes them more profitable for social media platforms.47 Fake news finds fertile ground in a divided electorate that has clear in-groups and out-groups, where people are ready to accept any statement as long it is consistent with what they already believe.48 Extreme examples of fake news spread by social media platforms can be found in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the dissemination of hate speech contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims and anti-Muslim riots, respectively.49 In the last several years, political actors have begun to use the knowledge power of social media to their advantage. A 2016 Rand study discusses the “firehose of falsehood” — a high-intensity stream of lies, partial truths, and complete fictions that impacted several democratic elections, including in Ukraine, Italy, France, Germany, and the United States.50 The “firehosing” that took place in America, for example, included attempts to influence public opinion and promote political protests.51 According to some scholars, authoritarian and illiberal states started using social media platforms to spread fake information to exercise their “sharp power.”52 This sharp power can stifle productive discussion in democracies, deepen domestic polarization, exacerbate ethnic tensions, rekindle nationalism, weaken public confidence in both journalism and elections, and diminish the overall influence of the Western-led international system.53 Authoritarian and illiberal regimes also use social media knowledge power, together with artificial intelligence, as a monitoring tool, allowing them to collect and analyze vast amounts of data on entire populations. Such regimes also undercut the credibility of valid information sources by using “bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.”54 Once citizens learn to assume that the regime’s fake information is true, they alter their behavior without the regime having to resort to physical repression.55 But it is not only authoritarian and illiberal states that use fake news to deepen domestic polarization, radicalize people’s politics, and rekindle nationalism. This also occurs in democracies. Some democratic countries are experiencing a rise in populist leaders, fueling a drift toward national-populism, illiberalism, and even autocracy. According to Adrian Shahbaz and Allie Funk, populists and far-right extremists exploit social media platforms to “build large audiences around similar interests, lace their political messaging with false or inflammatory content, and coordinate its dissemination across multiple platforms.”56 Paolo Gerbaudo argues that social media is attractive to populists because it provides an outlet for countering the perceived pro-establishment bias of mainstream news media. The filter bubble helps individuals who are politically disgruntled to congregate online and mobilize militant support for anti-establishment candidates.57 The unregulated social media platforms are thus converted into instruments for political distortion and societal control.58 In conclusion, social media can play a positive or a negative role: It can be a liberalizing tool, used to spread information and knowledge, but it can also be a tool of suppression, used to disseminate distorted information and fake news. Grassroots movements and freedom fighters can make use of social media platforms, but so can authoritarian regimes. The Variable Impact of Social Media Platforms Although social media platforms are used throughout the world, they seem to have a different impact on the political system in democratic regimes as opposed to authoritarian regimes. What accounts for this difference? Why do they spark revolutions in some states while supporting the rise of populist candidates in others? Why do they disrupt democratic elections in one country, but support the regime’s anti-democratic measures in another? In order to understand the varying effects of social media, it’s important to distinguish clearly between liberal and illiberal regimes. In addition, it is necessary to consider whether those regimes are strong or weak. Regime Types and Capacity We used the “freedom score” calculated by Freedom House and the Regimes of the World typology based on V-Dem data to distinguish between democratic and illiberal or authoritarian states.59 Countries are classified as democratic if they de facto hold free and fair multiparty elections and also guarantee freedom of speech and expression.60 A liberal democracy is also characterized by having effective legislative and judicial oversight of the executive and protecting individual and minority liberties and the rule of law.61 In contrast, an authoritarian regime is characterized by a government that permits people only a limited degree of political freedom. In such regimes, the government controls the political process and determines individual freedoms without any constitutional accountability.62 The “freedom score” is based on two main parameters — political rights and civil liberties — and it can show trends in a state’s score over the last several years. Democratic states (“free” in Freedom House’s terminology) are those with a freedom score of at least 70, while authoritarian states (“not free”) are those with scores of 35 or less. Since there are some anomalies around the transition points (70 and 35) for the case studies in this article, we chose democratic states with scores over 74 — Brazil (75), the United States (86), and the United Kingdom (94) — and authoritarian states with scores under 25 — Russia (20), China (10), Egypt (21), and Iran (17). The only exception is Mexico, whose freedom score of 62 represents a deteriorating democratic state. The Regimes of the World typology confirms the above classification of the United States and the United Kingdom as liberal democracies; Brazil and Mexico as electoral democracies; Russia, Iran, and Egypt as electoral autocracies; and China as a closed autocracy. While the distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes can help to explain the variable impact of social media on the political system, a more powerful explanation emerges when we add state capacity to the equation. State capacity refers to the institutions and resources available to states for governing the polity. In this article, we distinguish between strong or capable states and weak or malfunctioning ones. In contrast to weak states, strong states possess well-functioning institutions and sufficient resources to carry out policies and major functions. Especially important is a state’s justice system and its monopoly over the means of violence (i.e., its coercive capacity). Thus, a strong state can supply security in its sovereign territory. Such a sense of security sustained over time can facilitate business and commerce.63 Weak states, on the other hand, lack the effective political institutions and resources to implement their policies, protect their populations from violent conflict, and deliver political goods.64 No single index can distinguish strong states from weak ones. State strength or capacity can be measured, among other things, by a state’s capacity to provide services to the whole population, the extent to which infrastructure and communication networks cover the state territory, and the level of the state’s control over its sovereign territory. It can also be measured through gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, GDP growth, and trade indicators because states with higher economic development enjoy larger pools of resources from which to extract taxes. For this paper, we used three different indicators to determine whether a state is weak or strong: the Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index,65 which takes into account political stability indicators such as the security apparatus, group grievances, uneven economic development, state legitimacy, and external interventions (which reflects the state’s coercive capacity);66 the World Bank data on Gross National Income, because, in an economically developed state, taxes constitute a significant portion of the annual income; and total military expenditures (as calculated by the International Institute for Strategic Studies), which indicate to what extent a given state is capable of mobilizing manpower for military service. Any one of these indices is not enough on its own to determine whether a state is strong or weak. China, for example, would not be considered a strong state according to the Fragile State Index or GDP per capita, but if one considers Gross National Income and total military expenditures, it is. Similarly, Brazil is not a typical weak state by the Fragile State Index, but when examining its military expenditure, which is much lower than that of strong states, it cannot be considered a strong state. A Causal Explanation of Social Media’s Impact In our analysis of the variations in the effects of social media platforms on states, we consider only American social media platforms that wield knowledge power, usually acquired through data collection and processing. We do not consider other social media platforms, such as the Russian platform VK or China’s WeChat, because they are more culture-dependent and less common outside their home countries. U.S. social media platforms are used in different ways by three main types of political actors: domestic opposition (dissidents or populist candidates), external forces (other countries or multinational corporations), and the governing regime. These actors use social media for political purposes in an effort to influence a state’s political system. But the outcome is beyond their reach because it is determined by the combined effect of the state’s capacity and the state’s regime. This essay will analyze these actors, together with the differences in state capacity and regime, to deduce a causal model that indicates four potential effects of social media platforms on states: destabilization, radicalization, intensification, and weakening. Destabilization takes place in weak authoritarian regimes when social media platforms facilitate the coordination and mobilization of dissidents and grassroots movements (which represent domestic opposition) in resisting the government’s tyranny. The governing regime in these cases usually lacks the coercive capacity to maintain internal order and stop well-coordinated resistance. This destabilization effect can ultimately lead to regime change or, in extreme cases, a failed state scenario. A recent example of this destabilizing effect, which resulted in regime change, is the 2011 revolution in Egypt that culminated in President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. The use of social media platforms as a disseminator of fake news and disinformation during an election process leads to a radicalizing effect when it occurs in weak democratic countries. Social media can be used by populist and anti-establishment candidates (domestic opposition) and may diminish democratic institutions and processes. Some of these practices continue even after these candidates are elected to office. Social media platforms may also be malignly exploited by external forces — Russia, for example — to disturb elections in democratic countries. The use of social media platforms is considered an integral part of the democratic election process because the platforms are vehicles for exercising free speech. This limits the governing regime’s capacity to restrict and counter the malign use of these social media platforms. This radicalization effect could steer a state that lacks sufficient checks and balances and a strong democratic tradition toward becoming an illiberal or authoritarian regime. Recent examples of this radicalizing effect are the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. The intensifying effect takes place in strong authoritarian countries when social media platforms become a surveillance tool of the governing regime, which uses them to intensify the government’s coercive capacity, suppress civil rights, and counter the domestic opposition. These platforms also enhance the state’s sharp power with regard to liberal-democratic states. Social media platforms do not usually have a substantial liberalizing effect in strong authoritarian countries because the regimes control the internet in their territory. Recent examples of the intensifying effect include laws in China and Russia that give the states the power to surveil their citizens’ activities on social media, and Russia’s intervention in democratic elections in several liberal-democratic states by using these platforms as disseminators of fake news and disinformation.67 The use of social media platforms by domestic populist forces or external malign forces can weaken domestic authority in strong democratic regimes, support the rise of populism, and diminish democratic institutions and ideas, such as multilateralism and globalization. Democratic norms in strong liberal regimes constrain these states from countering the malign use of social media, despite having the capacity to do so. In this scenario, the domestic political system becomes polarized, but the state’s established system of checks and balances and strong democratic tradition preserve its liberal character. Recent examples include the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and the U.K. Brexit referendum. Table 1 summarizes the four types of political effects that U.S. social media platforms have on states. In the following sections, we present four primary case studies to illustrate this model and describe the effects that social media platforms have on different states. The case selection is based on variations in the type of regime and the state’s capacity. The detailed case studies described in each classification are only the prominent ones in which the literature and the availability of empirical material regarding social media effects are more prevalent than others. The effect of social media on states is a relatively new research topic and the publications in this area are mainly concentrated on the limited case studies that we chose to present in this article. The case studies are the leading instances that represent the political effects of social media platforms on states: destabilizing, radicalizing, intensifying, and weakening. For the destabilizing effect, we look at Egypt, a prominent country in the Arab world with a stable leader for three decades who was nevertheless quickly overthrown after less than three weeks of protests. To demonstrate the radicalizing effect, we chose Brazil, a leading economy in Latin America, a region that underwent a rapid democratization process in the last 20 years of the 20th century but that, in the last several years, has reverted to illiberalism and even to authoritarianism. For the intensifying effect, we considered the malign use of social media in the most powerful authoritarian states, Russia and China. For the weakening effect, we chose the external intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, which is considered to be a leading case of authoritarian intervention because of America’s status as the most powerful liberal democracy in the world. In each of these sections, we discuss additional examples, but it should be noted that not all countries in the same classification are necessarily affected by social media to the same extent as the anchor case. The Destabilizing Effect in Weak Authoritarian Regimes Social media platforms can help to create and mobilize domestic opposition to the governing regime by making it easier for opposition members to connect, organize. and circumvent the regime’s restrictions. Organized resistance to the government’s tyranny may lead to regime change in weak authoritarian regimes, but some governments put in place surveillance systems that monitor social media platforms, helping to counter dissidents early in their organization stage and reducing the risk of regime change. In just over a year, a wave of unrest that first began in Tunisia in December 2010 swept through the Arab region, leading to the overthrow of four Arab heads of state.68 Power seemed to be shifting from authoritarian regimes to citizens. Social media platforms were credited with helping to cause this shift. Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain explain that digital media (including social media platforms) helped to shape events and outcomes by spreading protest messages, connecting frustrated citizens, and helping them to realize that they shared grievances and could act together to do something about their situation.69 The protestors succeeded in building and mobilizing a spontaneous domestic opposition. Other researchers contend that the “Internet may be the only avenue left for citizens in authoritarian regimes to influence government, fight corruption, or defend their rights.”70 Laura Stein outlines six different ways in which the internet and social media platforms may help social movements: by providing information, assisting people in mobilizing and taking an action, promoting interaction and dialogue, helping to connect different networks of people, serving as an outlet for creative expression, and promoting fundraising and resource generation.71 The use of social media platforms is part of each stage of any uprising in the internet era. In the preparation phase, activists use social media platforms to find each other, build solidarity around shared grievances, and identify collective political goals. In the ignition phase, which involves some inciting incident, social media helps to publicize that incident and enrage the public. Take, for example, the pictures of Khaled Mohamed Saeed, who was beaten to death by police in Egypt, or Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in Tunisia.72 In the street protests phase, the call for protests and the protest locations are coordinated online, while in the international buy-in phase, pictures, tweets, and videos from the uprising gain international interest and support. Usually, this pressures the rulers of the state to enter the climax phase, in which the state either cracks down and protesters are forced to go home (as in the case of Iran), rulers concede and meet public demands (as in Egypt and Tunisia), or the groups reach a protracted stalemate (as in Syria). The denouement largely depends on the state’s coercive power.73 Egypt serves as a good case study for the destabilizing effect of social media platforms. Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt from 1981 until 2011, resigning only 18 days after the beginning of the Egyptian uprising, which started in January 2011. Scholars are divided on the role that social media platforms played in the Egyptian revolution. Killian Clarke and Korhan Kocak argue that Facebook and Twitter contributed meaningfully to mobilizing the “first movers” (the demonstrators who participated in the protest on Jan. 25, 2011) to form an ad hoc domestic opposition. These platforms helped to produce this outcome by recruiting people, planning and coordinating a leaderless protest, and providing live updates. The success across these three dimensions helped to convince many other Egyptians to join in subsequent protests, thus setting in motion a revolutionary cascade that resulted in Mubarak’s ouster.74 Juby John Eipe also underlines the significant role that Twitter played in initiating, organizing, and executing a powerful political movement in Egypt, including mobilizing people with no political background.75 Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain note that YouTube and other video archiving platforms allowed citizen journalists, using mobile phone cameras and consumer electronics, to broadcast stories that the mainstream media could not or did not want to cover.76 Others are not so fast to give all the praise to social media. Tarak Barkawi is critical of the credit given to “Western technology” rather than to the “ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime.”77 He argues that the West imagines itself as the real agent in the uprisings and he denounces “fantastically Eurocentric” narratives. “To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak,” Barkawi writes. Mason agrees that social networks allow people to assemble and protest but insists that the revolutions in the Arab world “have been social, political and real — not virtual.”78 According to Mohamed Ben Moussa, social media platforms were only effective because they operated in synergy with a huge array of “other more conventional media and offline societal networks.”79 Regina Salanova agrees that, in the end, Al-Jazeera and other international media “amplified the message, attracted the majority of the population to join the revolts and put pressure on the authoritarian states by engaging international audiences.”80 Ian Black notes that state surveillance of social media platforms compelled activists to use alternative media and communication tools.81 The Egyptian uprising is not the only example of social media playing a prominent role in political upheaval. Mark Pfeifle, a former U.S. national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, wrote regarding the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran that “[w]ithout Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.”82 He also called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the uprising in Tunisia, the blogosphere provided a forum for open political dialogue on regime corruption and the potential for political change.83 In Sudan’s 2019 uprising, social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook) gave people an alternative source of information and an opportunity to organize and rebel against their government.84 This enabled dissent to spread from regional cities, such as Atbara, to Khartoum and elsewhere much faster.85 Social media platforms also helped diaspora communities to stay updated about events in Sudan and play an invaluable role in the uprisings by sharing updates and fostering solidarity.86 Again, some scholars have downplayed the impact of social media on these events. Golnaz Esfandiari wrote regarding the Green Movement after the 2009 elections in Iran: “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”87 Bruce Etling and his coauthors agree that Twitter did not necessarily play a role in organizing the Iranian protests.88 Others attribute less importance to social media’s role in rallying local audiences and focus instead on the “bridging function” of social media platforms, which allows them to inform international audiences and mainstream media.89 Social media platforms can also be effective in bolstering authoritarian regimes,90 which may help explain why, in the years after the Arab Spring, there were fewer revolutions in weak authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes, even those that lack financial resources, can now use social media surveillance tools that weren’t available to Egypt during its revolution to monitor and control society.91 This is due to the availability of various low-cost surveillance tools exported by China and Russia.92 The Iranian regime, which learned from the 2009 unrest, is an example of a weak authoritarian regime that took the use of social media platforms for surveillance to the next level. It combined using surveillance tools with exerting strict control over the domestic internet infrastructure. The development of Iran’s state-controlled National Internet Network significantly enhanced the government’s ability to restrict, block, and monitor internet use in Iran,93 providing it with one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the internet and allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.94 In 2009, mass surveillance operations significantly aided the authorities’ ability to identify, track, arrest, and imprison protesters.95 During the unrest that swept through Iran at the end of 2017, the authorities implemented major disruptions to internet access by slowing it down, blocking social media platforms (such as Instagram and Telegram) that were used by the protesters to mobilize street protests, and briefly cutting off Iranians’ access to the global internet. Some weak authoritarian governments have also learned to control the networked public sphere through “surveillance and repression, using fear, blocking of information, mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, doubt, confusion and distraction.” This makes it hard for ordinary people to “navigate the networked public sphere and sort facts from fiction.”96 Instead of denying internet access to dissidents, which is sometimes difficult to do, these governments prefer to “deny attention, focus, and credibility.”97 Clarke and Koçak claim that social media platforms were, and still are, relevant because dissidents in authoritarian environments have simply switched to new social media platforms that the government hasn’t started monitoring yet.98 The new generation of dissidents uses messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. Activists used these apps instead of Twitter in the 2018 revolt in Armenia and have used “Facebook live” for real-time coverage of anti-governmental protest activities in Nicaragua.99 In summary, social media can have a destabilizing political effect in weak authoritarian regimes. Social media (a liberalizing force) can help to create and mobilize domestic opposition by making it easier to alert and connect people who have shared interests. It also helps people to organize more easily and lets protesters know that they are not alone. Facebook’s filter bubbles may help to convince people that there is more support for their position than there really is, thus generating a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives people to the streets. Although social media may not be the only reason why a revolution takes place, it can certainly play a significant role. However, in the last several years, many weak authoritarian regimes have been able to afford the purchase of surveillance systems from China and Russia that monitor social media platforms and assist the repressive governing regime, deterring and countering dissidents during organization stage.100 The governing regime also uses social media platforms to spread misinformation, leading people to doubt what they read on these platforms and perhaps deterring them from joining a potential uprising. The Radicalizing Effect in Weak Democratic Regimes Social media is a low-cost and convenient communication tool that can be used by opposition populists to reach their supporters, by the governing regime to engage directly with the electorate, and by malign external forces to spread fake news. These platforms can be exploited to spread fake news and narratives that are polarizing, divisive, and anti-liberal because they lack the fact-checking found in traditional media outlets. Social media helps populists (both as candidates and as part of the governing regime) to aggregate and unify people to promote a shared cause against the liberal establishment and liberal freedoms and to erode democratic pillars. Malign external actors use social media to intervene in democratic elections in weak democratic countries to cause further erosion of trust in the democratic system. These combined actions create a radicalizing effect in weak liberal democracies that can potentially turn a liberal-democratic regime into an illiberal regime, or even an autocratic one. There are several examples of weak liberal-democratic regimes worldwide, namely new democracies in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Freedom House’s freedom score has declined in some of these countries over the last several years: From 2016 to 2020 Brazil’s score dropped six points, from 81 to 75; the Philippines fell six points, from 65 to 59; and Mexico lost three points, going from 65 to 62. This decrease in freedom scores may be explained by the rise of populist leaders in these countries and the erosion of democratic pillars, such as free and unbiased elections.101 According to the Democracy Report 2020, Latin America has regressed to a level of democracy last recorded around 1992.102 In the last decade, Latin American presidents and candidates started using social media to engage directly with the electorate. Social media is perceived as the voice of the people and more authentic than the mainstream media, “which responds to the agenda of their super-rich owners and their political allies, rather than to the real needs and interests of the public.”103 By 2014, the region had the world’s highest use of social media by politicians.104 According to Emarketer, people in Latin America are the most avid social media users in the world.105 The vast majority of them get their news straight from social media services because they place less trust in traditional media. For example, WhatsApp has 120 million users in Brazil, a country with a population of 200 million. Thirty-five percent of these users regularly rely on the messaging platform for their news consumption, which makes WhatsApp networks “fertile for planting false information that can spread quickly from group to group until it is out of control.”106 These countries are therefore more susceptible to efforts to promote divisive and anti-liberal narratives, whether by domestic opposition or malign external forces, via online platforms. Moreover, polarization is a significant characteristic of Latin American politics, and the use of fake news communicated via social media platforms has proved to be more effective within polarized societies.107 This environment is primed for the rise of populist candidates who are inclined to promote an illiberal regime and can further foster radicalization and change toward a national-populist, illiberal, and even autocratic regime. This is especially true given that the checks and balances in states with only a short democratic history are less effective than in long-established liberal states.108 Populism is an ideology that views society as divided into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite — “us” versus “them.”109 Populists portray themselves as anti-elitist, anti-pluralist, supporters of moralism, and the exclusive legitimate representatives of the people in defiance of the unresponsive political elites. The rhetoric used by populist leaders generally focuses on the perception of a state in a crisis that needs to be resolved. Populists often use a dramatized and discursive repertoire that creates tension between antagonistic blocks.110 Pippa Norris notes that populism undercuts the legitimacy of the checks and balances on executive power that were “protecting citizens from strong leaders advocating authoritarian values attacking the heart of liberal freedoms, social tolerance, and cosmopolitanism.”111 Populism exists across the political spectrum. According to Paolo Gerbaudo, the populist right “tends to take highly exclusionary and xenophobic forms, whereby the people are constructed in opposition to the Other, and in particular migrants and ethnic and religious minorities.” Left-wing populism, on the contrary, opposes “immoral privilege, as embodied by greedy bankers, rogue entrepreneurs, and corrupt politicians accused of exploiting the people.”112 Postill also discusses centrist populists — opportunistic technocrats who borrow populist rhetoric and blend it with a pro-market language of job flexibility, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.113 Gerbaudo, who studies the relationship between populism and social media, explains that social media provides a platform for populists to gain people’s support against a liberal establishment that is supposedly victimizing them.114 Populists are able to unify otherwise dispersed and divided people to promote a shared cause, exploiting the platforms’ “economy of attention” and filter bubble effect. In this way, populists develop online followers of like-minded individuals and “siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.”115 In Brazil’s 2018 elections, Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate, was elected president with 55 percent of the vote, putting an end to the social-democratic pact that had been established after the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s. In these elections, the far-right opposition movement “Brazil over Everything, God above Everyone” overtly used the spread of misinformation and fake news through social media to advance its discourse. This included attacks against the Workers’ Party, the group’s main competitor, associating them with child abuse, female nudity, and more. Bolsonaro’s campaign also used social media platforms to attack feminists and minority groups, including the LGBT community, blacks, and indigenous people.116 Up until the 2018 election, political television advertising was the primary means of reaching out to Brazil’s electorate. Bolsonaro’s low-budget campaign, however, relied heavily on political micro-targeting via social media to directly engage with his electoral base.117 His early supporters distrusted mainstream media and assumed that social media is more genuine “because it’s filled with friends and family.”118 The campaign focused on professionalizing a fake news industry by using WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.119 Bolsonaro’s entire campaign was built upon “exploiting a political behavior tied into a sense of fear — fear of being shot, of crime, of unemployment — that ends up creating space for the acceptance of authoritarian feelings latent in society.”120 Angered by violence, scandals, and a deep recession, voters were ready for Bolsonaro’s messages about crime, corruption, and family values. He energized voters who disliked the ruling party and who detested all the other candidates.121 He benefited from the high levels of cognitive dissonance that some voters were experiencing — between their image of the country and the world as it is. Over the years, Bolsonaro has repeatedly called for Congress to be closed and has said that he would “start a dictatorship right away if elected president.”122 During the 2018 election, he continued his attacks on the idea of liberal democracy and the legitimacy of the media as well as on other political opponents.123 His final speech before election day was a direct attack on several democratic norms, reiterating the central themes of his campaign: diluting the power of minorities, closing down non-government organizations, and promising to imprison his opponent in the race, Fernando Haddad.124 Democratic principles further erode when candidates such as Bolsonaro, who use social media manipulation as part of their campaign strategy, continue with these tactics after assuming power and becoming part of the governing regime.125 For example, since assuming power, Bolsonaro has used different means, including fake news, to discredit Brazil’s electoral processes (such as when he questioned the integrity of the 2020 municipal elections), lash out at the Brazilian Supreme Court and Supreme Electoral Tribunal, and fight federal police on investigating him and his allies.126 Support for democracy in Brazil dropped from a peak level of 55 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2018.127 By 2020, only 15 percent of Brazilians said they were satisfied with democracy, a drop of 35 points compared to 2014.128 Bolsonaro’s election thus marks the intensification of a process of decay that has affected Brazil’s democratic system for some time. Brian Winter suggests that Bolsonaro, when faced with resistance as a president, “will ignore or trample democratic practices and norms to get his way.”129 Since the checks and balances in Brazil, as in many other Latin countries, are weak and insufficient, such action by the president could further weaken democratic institutions and lead to regime change. In addition to the domestic attack on democratic institutions, Brazil is also experiencing external intervention as part of Russia’s propaganda operations in Latin America aimed at promoting divisive narratives through online platforms.130 According to Brian Fonseca, Russia’s objective is “to erode confidence in Western institutions such as democracy and free trade, as well as Western-dominated sources of information.”131 Moscow has been using social media platforms to exaggerate, distort, and fabricate falsehoods regarding U.S. and Western activities in the region.132 As a liberal-democratic regime, Brazil has only a limited set of tools to defend itself from the malign use of social media both from outside and within the country. Brazil is not the only country in which democracy has been deteriorating. In Mexico, internal support for democracy dropped from 48 percent in 2015 to 38 percent in 2018,133 and a far-left populist, anti-establishment candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected in 2018 in a campaign that made heavy use of social media. Since his election, democratic institutions in Mexico have been under attack. For example, Obrador has stated that the National Electoral Institute and the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary “were created to prevent democracy.”134 Another example is the actions taken by Obrador to weaken the autonomy of the judiciary and to replace some judges with Obrador’s close allies. Mexico has also been the target of Russian propaganda operations.135 Other Latin American countries with characteristics similar to those of Brazil and Mexico are at risk of following the same path of eroding democratic norms.136 In summary, social media platforms have a radicalizing effect in weak liberal democracies, facilitating the rise of populist candidates who erode the country’s democratic norms and institutions and may lead to regime change. Social media is a playground for spreading fake news and narratives that are polarizing, divisive and anti-liberal — without the fact-checking filter of the traditional media. It helps populists to aggregate and unify people to promote a shared cause against the liberal establishment or the corrupt elites, positioning themselves as worthy alternatives to the existing governments. Malign external forces also try to use social media platforms to intervene in these countries’ democratic elections.137 The Intensifying Effect in Strong Authoritarian Regimes Social media platforms can intensify the power of strong authoritarian regimes by helping them, directly or indirectly, to become “digital dictatorships.”138 These regimes use the knowledge power of social media platforms as part of their surveillance machine. They can monitor and block social media platforms to hinder the ability of dissidents and domestic opposition groups to organize and mobilize. Authoritarian regimes also use social media platforms as tools to apply sharp power against liberal-democratic countries worldwide and as a way to spread fake news in democratic elections. Between 2000 and 2017, 60 percent of all dictatorships faced at least one anti-government protest of 50 participants or more. Ten authoritarian regimes fell during this period and 19 were replaced through elections, many of which came in the wake of mass protests.139 According to Democracy Report 2020, pro-democracy protests reached an all-time high in 2019 as people took to the streets to protest the erosion of democracies and to challenge dictators.140 The leaderless nature of 2019 Hong Kong protests against China, for example, was made possible by social media. Protesters took their cues from more than 100 groups on the instant messaging app Telegram, dozens of Instagram pages, and online forums like LIHKG. These groups were used to post everything from news on upcoming protests and tips on defending oneself from tear gas canisters fired by the police to the identities of suspected undercover police and the access codes to buildings in Hong Kong where protesters could hide.141 Overseas Chinese dissidents and activists played a crucial role by assisting and even guiding activists in Hong Kong. Chinese expatriates connected with those in Hong Kong via social media to get information about what was going on to journalists, non-governmental organizations, and activists in other countries.142 In the last 20 years, the more durable authoritarian regimes have been those that have implemented digital repression.143 In order to avoid regime change, strong authoritarian regimes have used their economic strength and coercive power to embrace technology and become “digital autocracies.” That is, they restrict their citizens’ use of the internet and social media while harnessing a new arsenal of digital tools to deal with mass anti-government protests. China has long maintained strict regulations that determine which websites and social media platforms are accessible in the country and which are blocked behind its “Great Firewall” of internet censorship, which is part of the country’s “cyber sovereignty” model.144 In 2003, Debora Spar claimed that “if people in China want to get information from sites in Silicon Valley, even the most omnipotent of governments will be hard-pressed to stop them.”145 But recent years have proven her wrong. China blocked YouTube in March 2008, the same month that a significant wave of protests-turned-riots swept Tibet. It blocked Facebook and Twitter the next year, soon after an outbreak of ethnic unrest rocked Xinjiang in July 2009.146 China employs advanced technology to censor its citizens on social media (and access their private information). This technology, combined with laws, regulations, and ramped up enforcement, is increasingly being used to repress dissidents and domestic opposition voices and shape the online conversation.”147 Many of the state’s censorship tactics operate with a “light touch,” so that Chinese internet users do not necessarily detect the filtering and deletion of material that is going on behind the scenes. There are seven topics that social media content shouldn’t contravene according to the Chinese government: “China’s rules and laws, the socialist system, the country’s national interests, the legitimate interests of citizens, public order, morality, and authentic information.”148 Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo have no choice but to actively participate in the monitoring and censorship of their users in order to stay in business.149 U.S. social media platforms, which could potentially act as a liberalizing external force, cannot operate in China without becoming active partners in the government’s efforts to silence dissent through censorship, mass surveillance, and the use of criminal charges.150 In December 2017, an official from China’s Cyberspace Administration stated: “If they [foreign social media] want to come back, we welcome [them]. The condition is that they have to abide by Chinese law and regulations and that they also would not do any harm to Chinese national security and national consumers’ interests.”151 Collaboration with the Chinese government contradicts the liberal agenda of most of these corporations, which see themselves as champions of free expression. However, some of them, including Google, are directly and indirectly helping China to enhance its internet surveillance capabilities and censorship technology.152 Russia, another strong authoritarian regime, lives in constant fear of U.S. efforts to interfere with the Russian regime. After witnessing the role that social media played in the Arab Spring, Russia became increasingly concerned that America had “found a truly magic tool that could bring people to the streets without any organizing structure.”153 This fear was amplified by several statements made by Alec Ross, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation at the U.S. State Department, including his comment in 2011 that “the Che Guevara of the twenty-first century is the network” and “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before … because of the devolution of power from the nation-state to the individual.”154 This fear became a reality when protests erupted over irregularities in the 2011 Russian legislative elections — protests that were facilitated by Facebook and Twitter.155 Sergei Smirnov, director of the FSB (Russia’s security agency), stated in 2012: “New technologies are being used by Western special services to create and maintain a level of continual tension in society with serious intentions extending even to regime change.” He emphasized that Russia needed to develop ways to respond to such technologies.156 In June 2012, legislation was introduced in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, to impose a nationwide filtering system on the internet. The legislation was approved a month later. In 2013, a system for social media monitoring — Mediaimpuls — was introduced. Russian law allows the authorities to block online content, including social media websites whose activities are deemed “undesirable” or “extremist,” and to prevent users of social media and communications platforms from remaining anonymous.157 Under its 2019 Sovereign Internet Law, Russia is centralizing internet traffic in the country and creating chokepoints (similar to China’s Great Firewall). The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (or Roskomnadzor) is exercising its authority inside Russia and outside its borders to silence protesters and anti-Russian voices.158 China and Russia have started to proliferate their models of digital authoritarianism across the globe. China is exporting its digital tools for domestic censorship and surveillance to different countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. Russia is disseminating its tightened information control model coupled with intimidation of internet service providers, telecom providers, private companies, and civil society groups.159 Russia’s model may be an appealing, relatively low-tech, and inexpensive alternative to the Chinese model because it does not require information filtration capabilities and can be implemented without a pre-existing government firewall.160 In addition, some of these tools that were initially developed for domestic use are now being used as part of the “sharp power” campaign that Russia is waging against liberal-democratic regimes. This includes using automated accounts (“bots”) on social media to manipulate and “amplify influence campaigns and produce a flurry of distracting or misleading posts,” sowing confusion and uncertainty through the dissemination of alternative narratives.161 Another tool, the use of internet trolls, involves paying people to disrupt online discussions by deliberately posting inflammatory or off-topic messages over social media platforms in order to provoke and intimidate. Russia conducted a massive troll attack against Ukraine and other countries after annexing Crimea.162 Both trolls and bots have been used by Russia through social media platforms in democratic elections across the world in the last five years.163 They helped to elect populist nominees or promote their agendas, deepening domestic polarization, ethnic tensions, and anti-migrant and anti-minority sentiments while eroding democratic institutions. To summarize, American social media platforms may intensify the power of strong authoritarian regimes by helping them, directly and indirectly, to become digital dictatorships. They use the knowledge power of compliant platforms as part of their surveillance machine while blocking those platforms that refuse to play by their rules. China and Russia export their restrictive practices to other authoritarian states, helping them to adopt similar practices in their countries. Russia also uses social media platforms as tools to apply sharp power against liberal-democratic countries around the world. The Weakening Effect in Strong Democratic Regimes The spread of fake news, disinformation, misleading information, and falsehoods through social media platforms as part of malign “perception management”’ orchestrated by domestic populists and external forces (such as Russia) may weaken strong liberal-democratic regimes. Such social media campaigns amplify extreme views, polarization, conspiracy theories, and doubts about democratic institutions and processes and weaken people’s trust and confidence in these institutions and processes. In strong democracies, the erosion of democratic pillars is less dramatic than in weak democracies because the checks and balances of strong democratic regimes remain a solid protection against domestic populist opponents and malign external actors. The use of social media for political campaigning is not new to liberal-democratic regimes. American President Barack Obama used big data and individual marketing to drive people to the voting booths in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.164 What is new is the malign use of these platforms and their mobilization by external forces and populist domestic opponents to change people’s perceptions. The dependence of democracies on free and open political discourse provides opportunities for external forces to infiltrate their information ecosystems.165 Researchers identify the 2016 U.S. presidential elections as a watershed moment in terms of the impact of fake news on social media platforms on presidential elections.166 A U.S. national intelligence report claims that Russia’s Internet Research Agency, an army of social media trolls created in 2014, was part of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. This interference included propaganda campaigns in the media and a troll campaign on social media aimed at undermining public faith in the American democratic process.167 The Internet Research Agency spent more than $100,000 on Facebook political ads between June 2015 and May 2017, using 470 fake accounts.168 Facebook reported to the U.S. Senate that Russian trolls created events on Facebook that were seen by more than 300,000 users between 2015 and 2017 and that around 62,500 people planned to attend these events. Russian accounts used Facebook to promote pro-Trump rallies, such as “Florida Goes Trump” in August 2016, as well as events in May 2016 protesting the opening of an Islamic Center library.169 Facebook acknowledged that 146 million users might have viewed Russian misinformation on its platform during the election campaign, while YouTube identified 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter acknowledged 36,746 Russian-linked accounts.170 Similarly, researchers discovered massive Russian meddling on Twitter in the lead up to the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016.171 More than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages in English urging British people to vote to leave the European Union in the days prior to the referendum. Most of the messages sought to inflame fears about Muslims and immigrants and to intensify the polarization of the electorate.172 British Prime Minister Theresa May even publicly accused Moscow of seeking to “weaponise information” and “sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.”173 She added that Russia’s cyber activities included “deploying its state-run media organizations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images.”174 This phenomenon seems to be spreading and intensifying. In 2017, for example, one year after the U.S. presidential elections, at least 18 other national elections were targeted by social media manipulation and disinformation tactics.175 According to the U.S. Justice Department, the Internet Research Agency used Facebook’s own tools to ensure that its propaganda was as effective as possible. These tools allowed the agency to receive real-time feedback about which ad campaigns were reaching their target audience and which posts were generating the most engagement with viewers.176 These “active measures” of media manipulation and disinformation, using social media campaigns, fake news, and troll armies, are designed to exploit political division and subvert the democratic process in the United States and Europe, “destabilizing the society and the state.”177 Russian “perception management” during liberal-democratic elections is based on the art of disinformation, or “using false or misleading information and injecting it or getting it credited by legitimate and credible sources.”178 Russia typically manipulates information using social media platforms to sow confusion and disruption. The aim is to create the impression that truth does not exist, thus undermining trust and authority in democracies. Russian manipulators on social media amplify extreme views, conspiracy theories, and doubts about democratic institutions.179 Russian intervention has found a receptive audience of people who believe that all truths are partial and that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event.180 Using disinformation and fake news in the public sphere may diminish the role of facts in public life and lead to what Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich call “truth decay.”181 Truth is a cornerstone of democracies and what distinguishes them from autocracies. The decaying of truth is dangerous for American democracy.182 But not everyone agrees that Russian intervention actually affected the 2016 election process. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow show in their research that exposure to fake news was insufficient to make a difference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that the effect of fake news was smaller than Trump’s margin of victory in key states.183 Another group of researchers also claim that the advertisements that Russia reportedly bought on social media were not targeted effectively on battlegrounds states and that the money it spent was dwarfed by the money spent by Trump and Clinton. Although Russia bought thousands of ads, they constituted only a fraction of the overall posts and tweets circulated on social media in the months leading up to the election. Moreover, even if people engaged with Russian-sponsored content, there is still the question of whether and how it affected their voting behavior.184 Even if Russian influence was not the main reason for Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, the spread of fake news via social media platforms deepened liberal societies’ distrust of political institutions and distrust of the media in particular. It can be hard to distinguish fake news and misinformation originating from external forces, such as Russia, from information coming from anti-establishment populist candidates in strong liberal democracies, such as Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the United States and Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom.185 These populists promote divisive narratives of “them” versus “us,” the “pure” against the “corrupt,” “the masses” against “the elite,” “the people” versus “politicians/parliament/judges.”186 These narratives deepen the polarization that already exists in these countries. The Fragile States Index shows that the Group Grievance and Factionalized Elites indicators in America and the United Kingdom doubled in the last 12 years.187 This polarization may lead to brinksmanship or gridlock, making the country less functional. According to Nate Haken, in this situation of fragmentation “the usual brokers (media, state institutions, opinion leaders, religious and community leaders) lose relevance and legitimacy, making consensus-building difficult with no shared vision or context to build from and organize around.”188 When populists mix divisive speech with fake news and disinformation, they further erode people’s trust in democratic institutions, processes, and the media. However, strong liberal democracies are still unlikely to undergo the same democratic decay experienced by some weak liberal regimes. While they are constrained in the means they can employ to counter the malign use of social media, their checks and balances are more stable and robust than in weak liberal democracies. Their greater resilience is grounded in a long-standing democratic tradition, and their checks and balances are less affected by recent actions, especially when the support for democracy among citizens is still high.189 Social media platforms can be used to weaken strong liberal-democratic regimes. These regimes derive their power from liberal-democratic institutions, which need constant attention and reinforcement in order to serve as effective bulwarks of democracy. It is also important to keep the media free, unbiased, and devoid of fake news and disinformation. The spread of fake news and disinformation on social media as part of malign “perception management” orchestrated by domestic populists and external forces may weaken liberal-democratic regimes. Liberal democracies are restricted in the means they can employ to counter the malign use of social media. For now, the checks and balances of liberal-democratic regimes remain a solid protection against domestic populist opponents and malign external forces. Counterfactual Reasoning The causal model presented in the article proposes that social media platforms are used by three types of actors — domestic opposition, external forces, and the governing regime — for political purposes, and that their overall influence on the political system is determined both by the state’s capacity and the type of regime. One may ask whether these same outcomes — destabilizing, radicalizing, intensifying, and weakening — would still take place without social media. The problem is that exposure to social media is so extensive that it is almost impossible to find examples where an uprising took place without social media. Nevertheless, we will mention some counterfactual reasoning related to weak authoritarian and weak democratic countries found in our research. According to one study, during the Arab spring in 2011, internet penetration was higher in the countries that were experiencing unrest than in those that weren’t.190 Internet users made up just 1.1 percent of Iraqis and 3.4 percent of Afghans in 2010, for example, compared to over 21 percent of the population in Egypt, 34 percent in Tunisia, and 88 percent in Bahrain. In the first three months of 2011, the number of Facebook users in the Arab world increased by 30 percent compared to an 18 percent growth over the same period in 2010.191 Countries where major civil movements have occurred have shown exponential growth in social media use during and after those movements. Still, it is hard to say that social media’s absence decreased the probability of online mobilization campaigns against the governing regime taking form. Some of the unrest was also fueled by traditional media outlets, as discussed earlier.192 In addition, some protest movements were constrained by the ability of governments to block internet access, as was the case in Iran. When it comes to Brazil, the percentage of people using the internet grew from 40 percent in 2009 to 70 percent in 2018, while support for democracy dropped from a peak level of 55 percent to 34 percent during the same time period.193 Only 15 percent of Brazilians said they were satisfied with democracy in 2018 (a drop of 35 points compared to 2014).194 A survey conducted in August 2018 by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics showed that only 25 percent of citizens trusted the federal government and only 18 percent trusted Congress.195 These numbers may indicate that Brazil had been radicalizing and drifting away from democracy for several years in relation to the growth in use of social media. But several researchers question the assertion that social media platforms are solely responsible for the deterioration of Brazil’s democracy, pointing to the many years of government corruption, rising crime, and economic recession.196 The above examples show that social media platforms did affect the political system in several countries, but that there may have been other causes as well. Nevertheless, as Patrícia Campos Mello claims, “the use of WhatsApp and other internet platforms amplifies whatever a political group says in an exponential way … If you find the right conditions in a country, they are really dangerous tools to undermine democracy and manipulate public debate.”197 The Way Ahead This article looked at four case studies to illustrate the varying effects of social media platforms depending on who is using them — domestic opposition, external actors, or the governing regime — the regime type of the country, and the state’s capacity. In weak authoritarian states, social media can help dissidents to communicate and organize more easily (the destabilizing effect), while strong authoritarian states can use it as a suppressive tool to exploit the knowledge aggregated on the different social media platforms (the intensifying effect). When used to disseminate distorted information and fake news in strong liberal democracies, social media platforms can erode democratic institutions (the weakening effect). These platforms can facilitate populist leaders’ rise in weak liberal states (the radicalizing effect), making them more susceptible to turning into an illiberal or even authoritarian regime. The malign use of various inherent characteristics of social media platforms — such as filter bubbles, echo chambers, a low entry bar, aggregate knowledge about people, the lack of fact-checking, information cascades, and the automatic recommendation algorithm — may lead to the erosion of democratic principles and institutions in liberal democracies across the world. Although the Russian intervention during the 2016 U.S. elections caught the attention of American policymakers and the American public, what has been less discussed is social media’s impact on other liberal democracies and what that might mean for U.S. national security and the liberal international order. The malign use of social media platforms is only one reason for the disruption of that order. Other factors include the 2008 financial crisis, job losses related to changes in trade and technology, and the increased flow of migrants and refugees, among others.198 But when it comes to the abuse of social media platforms, America should not wait for social media companies to fix the problem themselves.199 In order to prevent liberal democracies from becoming illiberal or autocratic regimes and potentially drifting into the Russian or Chinese spheres of influence, it is crucial that the United States and other democracies take action today. Maintaining the current liberal international order requires keeping the internet an American project led by private companies. This means countering Russia’s and China’s efforts to gain a greater voice in internet governance and to promote their agenda of cyber sovereignty, under which government control and internet regulations would replace a global and open internet.200 U.S. policymakers cannot rely solely on social media companies to implement policies and technological means to decrease the flow of hate speech and fake news on their platforms.201 There are a number of possible approaches to this problem that have been suggested. One possible solution that the U.S. government can pursue is to reintroduce competition into this sector of the market by passing antimonopoly legislation in order to dilute the concentrated power of social media platforms.202 This approach views social media platforms as essential infrastructure (like public utilities) needing specific regulation.203 These regulatory tools would ensure that the infrastructure “serves the public’s needs — rather than incentivizing exploitative or exclusionary uses for private profit.”204 Relatedly, policymakers could consider breaking up or decentralizing these corporations.205 Other options are more concentrated on users and the data that these companies own. One possibility is to make the companies declare “platform bankruptcy,” whereby social media platforms would reset their entire user and group follower counts to zero and rebuild communities from the ground up, with the platforms’ current rules in place.206 Another approach is to make these corporations collect less data and adopt practices to treat that data in a “manner commensurate with its value.”207 The problem is that none of these solutions is a “silver bullet” and American legislators may risk trampling on the constitutional right to free speech that they are trying to preserve.208 Ultimately, the best way to counter the spread of authoritarianism is to defend and restore democracy: the rule of law, fair elections, free speech, and freedom of the press.209 The United States should join other like-minded democratic governments in asserting principles to guarantee citizens the right to freedom of opinion based on reliable, pluralistic, and objectively sourced information. This can be done by securing free, independent, and reliable information and defending those who produce it.210 One such effort to impose democratic safeguards on digital information and communications platforms was made in September 2019 by 30 countries (not including the United States) signing the International Partnership on Information and Democracy.211 But government legislation has its challenges and should be recognized as a potentially dangerous tool. One challenge of this approach is identifying who gets to decide what is objective and reliable. Another challenge is demonstrated in the Network Enforcement Act proposed in Germany, which has come under criticism for practically legitimizing a model of online censorship that was subsequently copied by 13 governments around the world, most of which do not share Germany’s commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.212 An extreme measure suggested by Richard Clarke and Rob Knake is for the United States and its allies to create a digital bloc — an “Internet Freedom League” — in which data, services, and products can flow freely. Countries that do not respect freedom of expression or that engage in disruptive activity would be excluded from this internet realm.213 Whatever action U.S. policymakers decide to take, it is imperative that they act quickly. Disinformation and fake news will continue to materialize on social media platforms in new ways that cannot be easily countered. Without taking strict and prompt action, democracies around the world will continue suffering the weakening and radicalizing effects of social media that some of them already suffer today.

The lengthening shadow of authoritarianism would also reach out from Beijing. An increasingly assertive and nationalist China would demand and compel submission to its growing strategic ambitions—not just in southeast Asia and the South China Sea but in the Indian Ocean, all the way to the Middle East at one end and deep into the Pacific Ocean at the other. As China continued its march to technological supremacy and global leadership, a declining, demoralized, and discredited United States would have to decide whether to go to war to defend democratic Taiwan from being forcibly absorbed into China’s Communist dictatorship. Surging Chinese despotism would threaten the freedom of much of the rest of democratic Asia, even if Japan, South Korea, and other U.S. allies—at best exposed, at worst forsaken—were able to resist Beijing's growing efforts to penetrate and compromise their democratic political systems. It would be a hinge in history. How would democracy in Latin America fare in the face of this massive shift in global power and momentum, with the corrupting influence of Chinese money eroding democratic forces in party politics, the media, and government? How would the brave dissidents and demonstrators who cherish the values of self-government and human rights argue for the moral force of democracy as an idea with China on the march and America in retreat? How many wreak and tentative democracies would survive in Africa as its elites saw ever more clearly which way the winds of global power were blowing? How many multinational companies would conclude that their interests compelled them to ride the dictators' bandwagon? How many global broadcasters and social media companies would resist the autocrats' demands for censorship and complicity? In such a near future, my fellow experts would no longer talk of “democratic erosion.” We would be spiraling downward into a time of democratic despair, recalling Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s grim observation from the 1970s that liberal democracy “is where the world was, not where it is going.”5 The world pulled out of that downward spiral—but it took new, more purposeful American leadership. The planet was not so lucky in the 1930s, when the global implosion of democracy led to a catastrophic world war, between a rising axis of emboldened dictatorships and a shaken and economically depressed collection of self-doubting democracies. These are the stakes. Expanding democracy—with its liberal norms and constitutional commitments— is a crucial foundation for world peace and security. Knock that away, and our most basic hopes and assumptions will be imperiled. The problem is not just that the ground is slipping. It is that we are perched on a global precipice. That ledge has been gradually giving way for a decade. If the erosion continues, we may well reach a tipping point where democracy goes bankrupt suddenly—plunging the world into depths of oppression and aggression that we have not seen since the end of World War II. As a political scientist, I know that our theories and tools are not nearly good enough to tell us just how close we are getting to that point—until it happens.

Now, a growing “post-Chicago school” argues that antitrust law should be enforced more vigorously. Antitrust enforcement is necessary, they believe, because unregulated markets cannot stop the rise and entrenchment of anticompetitive monopolies. The shortcomings of the Chicago school’s approach to antitrust have also led to the “neo‑Brandeisian school” of antitrust. This group of legal scholars argues that the Sherman Act, the country’s early federal antitrust statute, was meant to protect not just economic values but also political ones, such as free speech and economic equality. Since digital platforms both wield economic power and control communication bottlenecks, these companies have become a natural target for this camp.

Big Tech poses unique threats to a well-functioning democracy.

Karin Matussek, Bloombert, “AI Will Fuel Antitrust Fires, Big Tech’s German Nemesis Warns” June 26, 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-26/ai-will-fuel-antitrust-fires-big-tech-s-german-nemesis-warns

Artificial Intelligence will intensify competition abuses by Big Tech, according to Andreas Mundt, the top German antitrust official who’s spearheaded efforts to rein in Silicon Valley. AI systems will become a closed shop and users won’t be able to escape to look for alternatives, Mundt warned at the annual press conference of his agency, the Federal Cartel Office. He said that together with their counterparts in countries like France or the European Union, German regulators are now looking at how to tackle the nightmare. AI is a “first-class fire accelerator” for anti-competitive tactics and “will make all the problems only worse,” Mundt said. “There’s a great danger that we’ll will get an even deeper concentration of digital markets and power increase at various levels, from chips to the front end” where tech interacts with users. While Mundt namechecked Nvidia Corp., maker of the gold standard graphics chip for training AI models, he didn’t indicate that the company was a specific target and he said his office hasn’t yet opened a AI-specific probe. However, his concerns play a role in the pending probe on whether the Federal Cartel Office will put Microsoft Corp. under heightened scrutiny, he said. The authority has seven digital-market probes against tech firms pending. Their power is the number one issue for competition authorities worldwide, Mundt said.

But an issue that unites Americans across political and geographic divides is that these corporations, collectively known as “Big Tech,” have too much power over nearly every facet of our lives. Even those, like X, that have lost the confidence of advertisers have the power to push whatever agenda they want. Big Tech monopolists are squeezing consumers, workers, and smaller businesses, and, with social media’s business model of engagement through enragement, contributing to the polarization of our society.

A robust debate is underway over the new rules needed for the digital era to deal with the host of digital harms with which our society has become concerned. But special-interest lobbyists have been trying to make an end run around the democratic process, seeking to tie our hands through binding trade agreements before we figure out what’s right. Big Tech lobbyists are exploiting the secrecy surrounding ongoing negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and elsewhere in an attempt to quietly rig international rules. These so-called digital trade rules would impose binding constraints on efforts by Congress, the Biden administration, and their counterparts around the world to regulate the digital sphere. The United States and other WTO signatory countries would be subject to trade sanctions unless and until they eliminate domestic policies that WTO enforcement tribunals deem to violate such constraints.

Correspondingly, Big Tech have assumed roles that extend far beyond agenda setting, infiltrating other policy cycle stages. With their advanced analytical capabilities, ownership/control over popular digital tools, and their ability to position themselves, their lobbyists, their researchers, and their past (or future) employees in key positions, Big Tech are able to redefine societal problems and propose innovative policy solutions at the policy formulation stage. In the decision-making stage, in addition to exerting influence on politicians (as discussed under Big Tech and the politics stream), Big Tech, with their financial power and control over digital infrastructure, data, and information, have increasingly assumed the role of decision makers by inserting themselves in various issue areas. In terms of policy implementation, in this growing tech-centric world, it is hard to imagine a policy program without the involvement and reliance on the technological tools or infrastructure developed or controlled by Big Tech. During the Covid pandemic, Big Tech partnered with telecom corporations and public health authorities worldwide to control the spread of the various (Storeng & de Bengy Puyvallée, 2021). Cloud services from Amazon or cybersecurity solutions from Microsoft and increasingly GenAI have become central to government operations worldwide. In addition, Big Tech often must implement and enforce regulatory decisions within their own platforms, giving them considerable control over how policies are actualized in the digital space and beyond. Moving on to policy evaluation, the role of Big Tech has become increasingly prominent in the age of GenAI. Credit to their control and ability to analyze vast amounts of data instantly and generating high-quality reports, ChatGTP and other GenAI models have already been applied for policy analysis and evaluation, which affects the termination or continuation of a particular policy program. This allows Big Tech to potentially influence the evaluation process by deciding which data to provide and how the data are analyzed and then reported.

Big Tech and the government