Journal of International Affairs Editorial Board

DIGITAL CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY: POLITICS OF AUTOMATION, ATTENTION, AND

ENGAGEMENT
Author(s): H. Akin Unver
Source: Journal of International Affairs , Vol. 71, No. 1, THE DEMOCRACY ISSUE
(FALL/WINTER 2017), pp. 127-146
Published by: Journal of International Affairs Editorial Board
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26494368

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26494368?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Journal of International Affairs Editorial Board is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
DIGITAL CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY:
POLITICS OF AUTOMATION, ATTENTION,
AND ENGAGEMENT

H. Akin Unver
Assistant Professor at Kadir Has University and Fellow at Oxford
University and Alan Turing Institute

Abstract: In the last decade, digital media platforms have grown out of their
mere communication functions and became inherently political governance
systems. They connect politicians, voters, large businesses, and major adver-
tisement companies that commodify user attention. This is already changing
the nature of the capital-politics relationship and is likely to significantly alter
the nature of resource generation in online and offline political networks.
Democracies are particularly vulnerable to the shift in online governance and
rent structures due to higher Internet penetration per capita. The current
business model of digital engagement, advertising, and political messaging
are prophesized to lock all sides into a vicious circle increasingly threatened
by more extreme content. Fake news, trolls, bots, and algorithms exploit this
rent generation cycle by feeding on measurement metrics of the current rentier
economics of digital media platforms. This trend has generated degrees of
concern around concepts dubbed as “networked feudalism,” “Authoritarianism
2.0 or 3.0,” and “Cyber-Communism.” This article evaluates the claims of all
three main critiques of online political structures from a political engagement
and resource generation perspective. The article argues that digital space is
still very much a democratic space, albeit imperfect, that needs to address
two fundamental issues: fixing metrics of digital engagement and bringing
human biases in algorithms into more expanded public and political debate.
Ultimately, “saving democracy” in digital space largely depends on institution-
alizing these two processes by giving users greater sovereignty over their data.

D igital interconnectedness was prophesized to usher in greater understanding

between people. It was supposed to be good for democracy, political par-
ticipation, and representation of disenfranchised segments of the population.
Digital communication did some of these things, but failed to fulfill a range of
other expectations. The golden age of information and communication tech-
nologies (ICTs) has witnessed greater political polarization, fiercer far-right, anti-
immigration and authoritarian movements, and greater confusion within online

Journal of International Affairs, Fall/Winter 2017, Vol. 71, No. 1. fall/winter 2017 | 127
© The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

interactions through mass oversupply of information.1 Social media has brought

like-minded people closer together, but widened the gap between opposing views.2
Digital tribes have begun to cluster around their online tribal structures and
developed hostile views toward opinion, news, and expression from other tribes.3
Information-seeking behavior, long heralded as one of the strongest political tools
of citizens, has been significantly manipulated by fake news. With the help of algo-
rithmically generated search results and automated accounts known as bots that
flood online debates with incorrect or old information, the very nature of informa-
tion flow is disrupted.4 Information overload did not make people more “rational”
and strengthen their verification heuristics; it made them more emotional and
automatic in their responses toward content validating their pre-existing biases.5
By playing into the “feel good” aspect of human psychology, factually distorted
news, produced in exponential quantities, have found a life of their own and influ-
enced significant political processes, the most important of which being elections,
the foundation of democracy.
Furthermore, perhaps more problematic is the role of technology companies
in democratic participation. The social media revolution and its impact on social
movements, political engagement, and information-seeking has rendered top social
media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube political
actors, at least on par with media corporations. News feeds and featured posts
are run by dedicated algorithms that are either tailored according to a user’s past
digital behavior, such as likes, comments, and engagement with posts, as well as
advertisers who pay large sums of money to be featured. This puts technology
companies at the center of political information-seeking and agenda-setting, two
fundamental processes of democracy. Furthermore, hate speech, group-targeting,
and fake news disseminated by bots significantly increase the volume of negative
messaging online, incurring greater weight over how policies are communicated
and how voter preferences are formed.
At the heart of the problem is the “intentions versus business model” debate:
namely, the discussion over whether technology companies are deliberately, or
at least passively, facilitating negative political messaging, or if the issue is more
structural, belonging to the for-profit business model of technology as a vocation.
Maximizing user engagement to increase revenue, for better or for worse, inevitably
leads to more extreme or emotional messaging on social media platforms and bal-
loons into disproportionate effect by platform algorithms. As far as algorithms are
concerned, users’ engagement volume, favorable or unfavorable, with cat videos and
political violence belong to a similar demand pattern. The kind of political mes-
saging users “like” and engage with, including political figures they support and
share, lead to the appearance of similar figures and messages online, leading to self-

128 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

generated and algorithmically supported filter bubbles. Without equal exposure to

different views, users end up thinking their view is supported by the rest of the
population and develop more extreme and entrenched opinions on politics. This
has led to unprecedented levels of polarization over emotionally charged policy
issues, fed by bot-generated news that fit into our version of events. Bombarded
with information overload, we rely on heuristics; we end up sharing what our
like-minded friends share and submerging into the opinion tribe we create for our-
selves, with the help of a business model that monetizes our attention.

Digital Challenges to Democracy: Networked Feudalism

The mainstream understanding of digital feudalism builds upon the
Habermassian interpretation of enclosure and distributionary monopoly to
examine how political participation is negatively influenced by private technology
actors.6 According to this interpretation, technology companies’ monopoly over
“closed technologies,” software and platforms that don’t allow users to alter or
modify interface, incurs significant biases over how users interact with digital
communication, which in turn alters how political participation through these
technologies reinforce centralized control structures, rather than participatory
politics. If we accept the Marx-Engels influenced interpretation of feudalism as a
system where the power rests with those that control modes of production, this
logic is partly true.7
However, the definition needs some expansion, especially since the original
understanding of feudalism refers to a rather different state of affairs than just
centralized control structures. Feudalism in its origins and rationale orbits a mili-
tary logic of creating a fighting caste that is organized into three layers of power
separation: lords, their vassals, and fiefdoms.8 Even when feudalism as a concept
is stretched, it includes the clerical establishment—religion—and its binary oscil-
lation between the wielders of armed authority in the control of the means of
production.9 The fundamental logic of feudalism is the supply of protection in
exchange for service. Those with either material resources of protection, like the
ability, authority, and legitimacy to raise an army, or religious capital, including the
ability to bless, shame, or excommunicate with authority, oversee vassals and fiefs
that supply the system either with military or non-military services. To that end,
it is not those who control modes of production, but those who can coerce modes
of production that accumulate the real power in feudalism.10
Therefore, the understanding of digital feudalism that is more in tune with
technology would be rather different. First, it would have to entail a fundamental
understanding of security and survival, since these two pillars form the basis of
why feudalism emerged in the first place. Yes, cybersecurity is an important aspect

fall/winter 2017 | 129

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

of digital space. But it is one that is still not fully independent from physical
variables of security. Second, it has to link security provision with rent genera-
tion; namely, the rent generated in digital space should overwhelmingly feed the
primary providers of digital security. The for-profit business model of digital tech-
nology is indeed in danger of developing feudalistic tendencies, but advertising
and digital content by themselves cannot be interpreted as feudalistic structures.
Digital security is not a monolithic term and means different things to different
players in the digital domain. For most users, digital security implies identity,
asset, and basic rights protection in an interconnected domain. It can imply ano-
nymity, VPN-masking, and privacy measures. For online sales and advertising
companies, security means trusted exchange, meaning no fraudulent transactions
and better authentication, along with cybersecurity of their network: defense
against malware, viruses, and worms, etc. For governments, the challenge is more
complex, since they must navigate both their own security considerations, such
as access control, monitoring, and surveillance, as well as constitutional and legal
responsibilities to address the security concerns of citizens and businesses.
Furthermore, the control of enclosed digital territories by a small group of
powerful corporations, or closed groups of programmer oligarchies in control of
algorithms that have power over the digital experiences of millions of people, still
does not fit into the feudalism concept. Resources generated from these interac-
tions don’t necessarily determine security relations in this network, and power is
still very much determined in profit metrics, rather than security metrics. Deriving
from securitization literature, the debate on digital feudalism does not have a
referent object.11 We don’t have a commonly agreed understanding of what needs
to be protected, nor a primary “warrior class” that provides security, so that a
singular feudal organization around it can be formed. We can certainly talk about
feudalisms embedded within micro understandings of securitization in a digital
order, but this is never discussed as such in the existing debate. More importantly,
neither states nor technology companies are at the top of the digital food chain.
States challenge other states, as well as nonstate actors; in turn, states, too, are
challenged by nonstate actors themselves. This prevents the emergence of a com-
monly agreed-upon concept of feudalism, as different actors securitize the Internet
and digital interconnectedness in often mutually exclusive ways with no single
actor dominating the security modes of production of the digital space.

From Each According to His Attention: Cyber-Communism

What about, then, two other possibilities to “digital democracy” that are
theorized in mainstream debate: Cyber-Communism or Authoritarianism 2.0/3.0?
There are several interpretations of both authoritarianism and communism in

130 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

digital space, mainly structured around the redistribution mechanisms of both,

along with the role of the state in production modes and with respect to their
citizens. Digital communism is hard to distinguish between digital Marxism and
socialism as they are discussed in mainstream debate, but it is often interpreted as
free distribution of digital commodities, such as eliminating intellectual property
rights, or presenting commercial software, codes, and algorithms in open-source
venues.12 Another variant of digital communism focuses on decentralized Internet
relations, favoring autonomous structures of self-administering digital systems,
much like the social economy model posited in Leninist variants.13 This reflects
one of the core dilemmas in communism, whereby a centralized distribution of
goods and services, along with autonomous social economy structures, are equally
advocated.14 More specifically, how the notion of common access to file and data
sharing platforms, as well as knowledge cooperatives like Wikipedia, the Open-
Source Movement, and pirated material, relate to modes of production is the
subject of extensive debate.15 General social knowledge, in Marxist terms, could be
a direct force of production, and thus systems and platforms that are tasked with
the accumulation of this general knowledge are parts of the collective capital.
Cyber-Communist variants, including Marxism and socialism, have been con-
structed in close proximity to the politics of media power in the writings of Dallas
Smythe, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Herberg Simon, and Graham Murdock.
Dallas Smythe was one of the earliest scholars to conceptualize the political
economy of media and communications within the context of Marxism, using
eight analytical nodes.16 These eight analytical nodes are materiality, monopoly
capitalism, audience commodification and advertising, media communication as
the base of capitalism, labor, technological determinism, dialectic of hegemony,
and dialectic of science. Hans Magnus Enzenberger expanded upon these nodes by
conceptualizing the media structure as the “mind industry,” which prioritized the
sale of the existing order. This order isn’t the sale of a product, as for Enzenberger,
modern communication technologies “have no product.”17 Instead, the modern
structure of technology sells itself, and it does so by selling better versions of users
back to themselves in the form of social approval, including likes and retweets.
This was later reconfigured by Herbert Simon’s emphasis on “attention as a com-
modity” and “attention as an economy.”18 Audiences are exploited by the very
means by which they engage with media—attention—and that is then sold as a
commodity in the form of advertisement. For Smythe, this was less exploitation
and more surplus value generation, as he constructed users not as passive objects,
but participants in a wider structure, driven by their desires for approval and con-
sumption. Users are taking part in media capital generation structure, not because
they are obligated to, as in communism, but because they choose to do so, as in

fall/winter 2017 | 131

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

consumerism. Graham Murdock built upon these claims to construct the power
of media companies’ production means within the context of their agenda-setting
power and on their “economic and political structures.” These structures are built
on their ability to “sell the status-quo,” rather than a specific line of product.19 In
that line, both the approval and criticism of the system has to be communicated
through the system itself, commodifying all exchanges regardless of their senti-
ment and belief in the status quo.
Simultaneously, a separate line of “culture industry” scholarship established
more direct connections between media regimes and politics. Horkheimer and
Adorno both diagnosed the rise of German fascism, Stalinist lineage, and consumer
capitalism in the same light: failure of the revolutionary potency of the working
class.20 For both, the failure of workers to generate their true movement has led to
their bandwagoning with Hitler in Germany, hijacking by Stalinism in the USSR,
and exploitation by capitalism in the US. Marcuse diagnosed this continual failure
of the working classes through “technological rationality”: the emergence of ever
more sophisticated technological interactions that generate individual reaction,
not action.21 Marcuse understood technology as an inherently addictive domain,
whose constant evolution into more advanced forms of interface and immersion
was creating constant alienation. In adopting from Marx’s notion of fetishism,
Lukács hypothesizes this as “phantom objectivity.”22 Phantom objectivity inserts
technological advances into the heart of human relations in a way that intensifies
human interactions but overwhelms human attention to the extent that it conceals
the fundamental nature and reflexes of human communication.
The nature of how digital media platforms are designed both in terms of
interface attractiveness and social validation mechanisms, specifically reinforces
this mechanism of addiction. According to Christian Fuchs, such feedback loops
of attention, attraction, and commodification inevitably lead to a reduction of
human agency toward mere consumption of digital advertisements.23 In addition,
what is essentially consumed aren’t products themselves but cultural commodi-
ties to which humans belong. Digital media systems have to sustain versions of
the message that capitalism is the only possible system that can produce and dis-
seminate meaning for consumers and the cultural context to which they belong.
Indeed, Smythe posits that “the starting point for a general Marxist theory of
communications is the theory of commodity exchange,” which in our terms is how
attention to digital content becomes a currency that rises into the primary medium
of financial interactions. Fuchs pursues this line in asserting that social media
has become a new medium of capital accumulation, which attracts participation
and engagement through attractive, and often addictive, platforms, including the
“promise for change” and championing human agency to “make a difference.” This

132 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

was evidenced in the debate on “Twitter revolutions,” “participatory cultures,” and

e-petitions, digitizing some state functions for citizen engagement, and generating
a snowball effect that eventually clustered bigger investors and large quantities of
people into the same manageable and pliant medium. “Platform Imperialism,” as
Dal Yong Jin posits, is structured upon this very premise: digital platforms sustain
their hegemonic status by acting as the medium of dissent about all digital relations
and interactions, including those that contain criticism about these platforms.24
Ultimately, digital communism debates concern a broad number of issues
ranging from corporations’ online commodity production, including capital con-
centration and centralization in digital platforms, production of media capital, and
labor relations of digital platforms, and commodity circulation designed to sustain
their hegemonic status at the heart of the means of digital production. Too often,
however, the term “digital communism” is used as a pejorative term to define
open-source software, content, or crowd-sourced platforms and digital initiatives
like Innocentive, Hypios, Innovation Exchange, Kaggle, Wikipedia, and so on.
However, it is built on a vision of information society as one that is ruled by trans-
national platform corporations, pervasive surveillance, and intrusive governments.
The general purpose of the system is its own continuity and status-quo power,
with those that have the greatest market influence also possessing the largest
weight over content production, curation, and directing global digital attention.
While states’ impacts are measured through their control over news and agenda-
setting power online, “platform capitalism” is engaged in a symbiotic relationship
with them, building their independent networks of influence and framing online,
while playing along with state interests to recentralize power back in the hands of
a controllable elite.

Believe, Obey, Retweet: Authoritarianism 2.0

Digital Authoritarianism, as conceptualized in mainstream tech debate, is
mainly about order and control-oriented, top-down practices that incur restric-
tive costs for online expression, engagement, and digital rights.25 Another variant
of this conceptualization is the proliferation of pro-fascist messaging in the form
of Internet trolls and bots and the diffusion of far-right extremist content on the
web.26 The 20th century debate on technology and the management of life as a
whole, as posited by Foucault and Canguilhem, fits modern ICT debates better.27
The way technology and science are ordered by fascist regimes eventually becomes
a social force, extending beyond its utilitarian origins, and starts determining the
bounds of expression and rights in a modern society. As far as the centrality of
technology is concerned, there may be some cases of arguing for the validity of
“techno-fascism.” But authoritarianism is also heavily state centric: “...all within

fall/winter 2017 | 133

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.”28 There is no higher
organizing order other than centralized and repressive regimes that are substan-
tially different than the private-capitalist structure of modern technology.
Authoritarianism-as-modernism pursues the same radical understanding of
progress compared to older forms of European conservatism, seeking to experiment
with newer and more repressive forms of organization in social life to maximize
progress as understood by advances in science and technology.29 In such experi-
mentation with social life, all sub-groups of organization are suppressed to uphold
the dominant single group and its symbols. Views that don’t conform to the hege-
monic ideology are eliminated, along with competing forms of labor organization;
both are far from the diversity seen in digital space.30 Umberto Eco’s reconceptual-
ization of “eternal fascism” does bring certain new elements to the old definition.31
However, none of Eco’s fourteen points, be it “rejection of the Enlightenment,”
“disagreement as treason,” or “contempt for the weak,” apply to the digital space.
Despite problems with resource generation mechanisms, ICTs are modernist, rife
with disagreement, and often mobilize to aid the poor and those in need. A much
better conceptualization of digital media fascism was made in Herbert Marcuse’s
“one-dimensional man,” whereby in a consumer society “humans become exten-
sions of the commodities that they buy,” generating their self-worth and self-
view through ownership of technology.32 This renders technological societies, by
definition, fascist in Marcuse’s view as it relates to total control of social relations
through a centrally overseen network of interactions. Although all social interac-
tions are overseen and monitored by states and technology companies, it is cur-
rently hard to assert that this surveillance mechanism has generated an Orwellian
system of direct repression. This point was later criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre
for being excessively pessimistic of consumers’ passivity in the face of advertise-
ment and techno-determinism, arguing instead that users have agency and they
must be criticized for their choice in sustaining dysfunctions of tech capitalism,
rather than pitied as a passive sufferer.33
ICTs did have positive impact on political participation by making political
campaigning, grassroots networking, voting, information-seeking, and even pro-
testing easier.34 But it also made censorship, surveillance, citizen profiling, and
tracking highly granular, as well as rendered extremism and disruption more
problematic.35 States have adapted to ICTs and their impact on politics through
a multitude of measures, ranging from censorship, information overload, and
troll and bot armies, tor restrictions, heavier controls on ISPs, and using ICTs to
expand surveillance powers as a whole.36 Although for countries like China, Iran,
or Russia, ICTs were already securitized to merit nationalization of platforms and
search engines, for much of the Western world, the Occupy Movement, Syrian

134 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

refugee crisis, and the rise of the Islamic State became reasons for increased coun-
terterrorism surveillance and restrictions online.37 In the same vein, foreign and
domestic terrorists and extremists in the West substantially benefited from the
Internet and ICTs, recruiting, planning, and communicating online. Moreover,
digital platforms themselves have adopted a hybrid role between dissenters and
governments. Numerous studies have demonstrated how digital tools, essential for
protest and dissent planning and coordination, deliberately or passively worked
with governments and intelligence agencies to help spy on these movements.38
In that context, digital authoritarianism debates are also strongly related to
how artificial intelligence interacts with digital communication platforms. As the
Internet and digital interconnectedness widened the space outside states’ control,
states fought back by investing in surveillance technologies that aim to centralize
communication regulation, monitor large segments of the population through
real-time data, engage in mass propaganda, and do all of this with a diminishing
reliance on slow human capital.39 Both machine learning and artificial intel-
ligence architectures are built on the premise that human relations—political,
economic and social—can be distilled down to common characteristics that are
identifiable and sortable through non-human mechanisms.40 Algorithms are
key to offering digital media services reliably and continuously to make increas-
ingly more complex decisions, and to streamline collection and storage of human
behavior into quantifiable patterns. From that perspective, there is an inherently
authoritarian dimension to automation, orbiting mass-surveillance and the collec-
tion of unprecedented amount of citizen information in the government-private
sector nexus.41 Yet the nature of human biases embedded in algorithms are usually
omitted from the wider debate on their political effect. When the Shanghai Jiao
Tong University created a facial recognition system to “predict” criminal behavior,
for example, testing convicted criminal faces against those of innocent civilians,
it completely omitted the possibility that the variances of facial expressions could
be a result of prison conditions, rather than dormant criminal tendencies.42 This
embedded bias then became the foundation of an algorithm that, in theory, could
test the “criminality” of individuals based on their facial patterns, potentially
leading to significant misjudgments.
Algorithms have also been offered as a sacrificial lamb by governments and tech
companies against mounting criticism of automated bad decisions. When Facebook
and Google pushed anti-refugee campaign content in key swing states before the
US elections, both blamed algorithms as the culprit, arguing that the automated
increase in screen time of such content was a result of advertisements.43 Regardless
of the intentions of specific tech companies, the fault lies at the heart of a wider
business model.44 The foundation of the contemporary digital media system rests

fall/winter 2017 | 135

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

on the monetization of digital attention through metrics that emphasize engage-

ment, such as likes, comments, and retweets, which, as a social behavioral trend,
tends to cluster around emotionally-charged, extreme content.45 Such content
then appears more frequently in users’ news feeds and selected posts, offering ad
companies the ideal intersection of profitability and ad efficiency. This locks all
sides in a polarizing vicious circle whereby extreme content gets more interaction
and is measured as more popular in online platforms, leading to the clustering of
exponentially greater volumes of money around the production and dissemination
of such content.46 This directly feeds into political campaigns and political adver-
tising, in addition to the tone of regular political messaging people encounter in
digital platforms. In a medium that is designed to encourage and reward extreme
messaging with engagement, the natural result is unprecedented polarization and
offline political engagement with leaders that sustain this extreme narrative.47
With the way both production means and resource generation mechanisms
are structured in digital communication, trolls and bots are an inevitability. Trolls
address hyper-engagement with emotionally charged content, exploiting psycho-
logical response mechanisms of online users. What bots do is simply increase troll
effects exponentially, bombard users with larger volumes of fake or manipulated
content, and exploit the very organizational model of online interaction mecha-
nisms.48 Unchallenged by counterarguments from rivaling views, people submerge
into their respective truths, eliminating the effect of doubt and maximizing self-
righteousness about one’s own views. People, too, are responsible for this state of
affairs by blocking and muting tools provided by the system, again, as a result
of their own demand. What renders social media and digital advertising link as
“authoritarian,” perhaps, is less the top-down organization of the system, or the
presence of a dictatorial body on top of the system, and more the culture of engage-
ment and resource generation. All levels of the digital hierarchy are operating in
this culture as parts of the same asymmetrically automated relationship.

Except for All the Others: Can Digital Space Remain Democratic?
Digital space is not feudal because the production means are not centralized
around a single, overarching understanding of security and survival that deter-
mines the nature of feudal relationship. It is not communist because the entire
business model of online rent generation is structured around commodification of
attention in a vaguely controlled capitalist environment.49 It is also certainly not
fascist because it is not driven by central, direct economic planning, it is not quite
militarist, and despite problematic applications, it does not constitute a state of
suspension of the rule of law. More importantly, calls to reform digital space are
not met with imprisonment or death. Digital space is still a democracy doomed

136 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

by its own rent-generating mechanics and institutions, similar to the challenges

associated with offline democracy. The capitalism-democracy nexus has survived
multiple crises and scored a longer lifespan compared to all other alternatives, and
despite current ills, the digital space is already democratic, compared to other
alternatives, albeit imperfect and vulnerable to manipulation.
The question of digital democracy links closely to debates on virtual com-
munity associated with studies by Howard Rheingold, Manuel Castells, and Craig
Calhoun. Rheingold’s The Virtual Community constructs the web as a parallel reality
to physical realities, with a fundamental transformative power to affect physical
politics and social relations.50 This transformative power came from the Internet’s
ability to offer a separate medium of interaction, rather than merely mirroring or
complementing physical reality. It is there that Rheingold’s alternative realities
of the Internet is an act of escapism, derived from his study of The Well (Whole
Earth ‘Lectronic Link, one of the oldest virtual communities still active) where
hierarchies and power relations are fundamentally restructured in favor of dis-
sidents in the physical realm. This escapism also contains a potential to establish
new communities, alternatives to those in the physical world, with the ability to
impact, alter, and augment those physical communities. Castells does not separate
virtual and physical communities; rather, he constructs digital space within phys-
ical space, as a part of physical communities. The Information Age depicts on-screen
experiences as an extension of the physical experience, instead of alternate to it,
but one that is unifying and centralizing.51 Castells diagnosed this unifying and
homogenizing aspect of the Internet as the source of how virtual space can change
reality in the physical work. Later in The Internet Galaxy, Castells argues that the
growing irrelevance of geography through the Internet leads to a restructuring of
social and political relations online through the creation of a digital community
with similar political and world views and potentially having similar expectations
from political processes, locality, and representation.52 Craig Calhoun focused
on this indirect relationship and the resultant loose communities it generates by
offering a middle way argument, stipulating that digital relations are supplemen-
tary to physical relations, rather than an alternative to them.53 Calhoun locates
the power of digital community, engagement, and representation specifically in
this reinforcing space; it is the multiplier effect of online social relations that
enhance physical interactions and communities. Yet Calhoun was skeptical about
the democratizing aspect of this multiplier effect. He found relations that are not
culturally specific as inherently weak and lacking the power to reinforce represen-
tation and engagement. Digital space, therefore, brings like-minded people closer
together but cannot create new political possibilities beyond those to which digital
actors already subscribe.

fall/winter 2017 | 137

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

This debate is important because it links directly to current political trends

in online versus offline political engagement. Despite the endogeneity problems
associated with Internet use and political engagement, the relationship between
the two is well established when controlled both for interest and efficacy or trust.54
Furthermore, digital space has so far recorded more vibrant criticism in social
media, chat rooms, or messenger programs in both liberal and illiberal regimes,
although the exact expression of this dissent yields different results in numerous
studies.55 Pippa Norris, for example, demonstrated how participation in e-petitions,
protests, and sit-ins has been altered through digital communication technologies,
although her later work with Ronald Inglehart demonstrated how political polariza-
tion in Western democracies have largely resulted in a backlash against the much-
prophesized digital democracy argument.56 In a study on American, Australian,
and British young voters, political use of social media directly correlates to offline
political activism, with similar patterns of polarization observed both online and
offline.57 In another study, citizen-initiated campaigning outside the United States
is observed as a political participation method largely benefiting the hegemonic
party with little advantage to opposition movements.58 The relationship between
political engagement and social media use is still being challenged, however, as
numerous studies have found mixed results related to how online and offline
political participation work in tandem.59
Current contractarian trends in citizens’ political engagement, evidenced
by the e-petition movement in the UK, Estonia’s transparency-oriented online
state functions, Finland’s open ministry, or Brazil’s Marco Civil, are some of the
examples of new adaptive processes of digital democracy.60 Despite its dangers of
commodification, Facebook’s “town hall” feature, which connects voters with their
elected district representatives, is another pioneering move that will certainly bring
together its own set of engagement problems, as well as irreversible new expecta-
tions of transparency and engagement.61 Election infrastructure will retain some
aspects of vulnerability given the pace at which both hackers and patchers of global
technology compete with each other. Fake news will not go away, nor will trolls or
bots, since similar influences exist in offline media systems. People have outgrown
them as they adapted to older technologies and will eventually outgrow digital
spoilers as well.
The fundamental problem of digital space is its main currency, attention,
which calls for a new political economy model properly contextualized in global
politics. To that end, although digital space isn’t Marxist, some of the most
fundamental critiques of digital space come from the Marxist tradition. Digital
communication platforms are the bridges between commodified human attention
and media corporations that have become business ventures. In being so, they

138 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

automatically feed in content that elicits greater volumes of engagement, leading

to more extreme types of message proliferation and attraction of capital online.
This emotional attention trap fuels the rise of digital spoilers like trolls and bots
and benefits leaders of extreme, and often fabricated, views. In a digital informa-
tion economy of oversupply, users rely on heuristics that help validate information,
which clusters them into digital tribes made up of people that think alike. Thus,
interactions with opposing views are minimized, generating unprecedented polar-
ization. Furthermore, access to the Internet is still very much defined by global and
regional inequalities, preventing us from coming up with an overarching conceptu-
alization of democracy. Digital freedoms and capabilities mean different things in
different parts of the world.
However, this polarization argument needs to be contextualized. Although it
has become a truism that social media contributes to political polarization, four
studies remind us to contextualize these claims in context-specific cases. Vaccari
et al. demonstrated how Italian and German users’ political disagreement patterns
regarding 2013 elections on Twitter persisted despite their ideological homophily.62
This is one of the major warning signs that polarization and disagreement on social
media can exist between ideologically proximous users and agreement/disagree-
ment patterns can be context-specific. In the same vein, Fletcher and Nielsen’s
six-country, multi-platform, comparative study demonstrates that online political
audiences aren’t necessarily more polarized than offline ones and, once again, that
polarization is a contextual, rather than medium-specific phenomenon.63 Finally,
Beam and Kosicki derive from a US-based survey that social media users with high
levels of partisanship don’t display increased partisan news consumption patterns,
substantially challenging “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” arguments, at least in
the US context.64
For the short term, digital space is likely to remain an imperfect democracy,
where the quality of representation and participation will be driven mostly by users’
physical location. Users in authoritarian countries will continue to experience the
web as a restricted and obsessively monitored domain, developing counter-mea-
sures such as IP masking and VPN services. They will be jailed for tweets or fined
for using encrypted messaging services. They will use complex masking systems to
mobilize against authoritarian governments and build elaborate layers of secret ties
to privacy developers in the West. The fight for digital democracy in these coun-
tries will be more vital and survival-oriented for the future of digital technologies
and will produce substantial lessons for the study of digital politics in the world
beyond Western democracies. Users in liberal democracies, on the other hand,
will experiment with more representative forms of political engagement, such as
the Flux party in Australia, digital urban design in Canada, the g0v movement in

fall/winter 2017 | 139

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

Taiwan, and the crowd-sourced constitution of Iceland.65 These experiences will

enrich the content of democracy as a whole and define the main course of progress
between technology and society.
Two key challenges remain, however: first, that the resource-generating model
of digital space benefits emotionally-charged content over verified information,
creating the very environment in which trolls, bots, and fake news thrive. This
relationship isn’t automatic and context-specific, as explained earlier, yet is suf-
ficiently problematic to disrupt and influence political processes during crises and
emergencies. Second, political debate, as well as voter awareness, on algorithmic
structures in charge of deepening and maintaining human-machine interactions is
still elementary. Despite the emergence of a promising field that explores political
and social implications of algorithm biases, that debate still has not attracted
global mainstream political focus. Both issues can be resolved by realizing that
ICTs are complex political and governance systems that generate significant public
and policy attention to their political institutionalization, not always with accom-
panying regulation, along with measures to democratize user data and open up
space for individual sovereignty in the digital world.66 While certain trends in ICT
research can yield potentially authoritarian and polarizing results, this relationship
is not structural, but is more context-specific. This, in turn, calls for more case
study research, as well as continued debate and restructuring of the relationships
between attention as a resource, digital political engagement, and architectures of
automation.

H. Akin Unver is an assistant professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University

and a dual fellow at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University, and
the Alan Turing Institute, London. With a background in conflict studies, he focused on radi-
calization and mobilization through geospatial and geopolitical tools. With a specific interest
in Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China, his research looks at the role of privacy-security debate
in shaping these countries’ Internet policies. Unver completed his PhD at the University
of Essex, Department of Government, and was a Marcia Robins–Wilf Young scholar at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a dual postdoctoral researcher at the
University of Michigan Center for European Studies and the Center for Middle East and
North African Studies. Unver previously held the position of Ertegun Lecturer at Princeton
University’s Near Eastern Studies Department, teaching courses on history of the Middle East
and conflict-terrorism sociology.

NOTES

1 Michael D. Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew R. Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro

140 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

Flammini, and Filippo Menczer, “Political Polarization on Twitter,” Proceedings of the Fifth International
AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Barcelona, Spain: Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence, 2011); Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of
Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,” Journal of Communication 59, no. 1 (2009), 19-39; Chris Atton,
“Far-right media on the internet: culture, discourse and power,” New Media & Society 8, no. 4 (2006),
573-587; Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and
Political Change,” Foreign Affairs (January 2011), 28-41; Hajo G. Boomgaarden and Rens Vliegenthart,
“How news content influences anti-immigration attitudes: Germany, 1993–2005,” European Journal of
Political Research 48, no. 4 (2009), 516-542; Ted Brader, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay,
“What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat,”
American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 4 (2008), 959-978; Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow,
“Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election” (Working Paper no. w23089, National Bureau of
Economic Research, 2017); David Westerman, Patric R. Spence, and Brandon Van Der Heide, “Social
Media as Information Source: Recency of Updates and Credibility of Information,” Journal of Computer
Mediated Communication 19, no. 2 (2014), 171-183.
2 Jürgen Pfeffer, Thomas Zorbach, and Kathleen M. Carley, “Understanding online firestorms:
Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks,” Journal of Marketing Communications 20,
no. 1 (2014), 117-128; Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag eth-
nography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1
(2015), 4-17.
3 Elanor Colleoni, Alessandro Rozza, and Adam Arvidsson, “Echo Chamber or Public Sphere?
Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data,”
Journal of Communication 64, no. 2 (2014): 317-332; Cristian Vaccari, “From echo chamber to persua-
sive device? Rethinking the role of the Internet in campaigns,” New Media & Society 15, no. 1 (2013),
109-127.
4 Jacob Ratkiewicz, Michael D. Conover, Mark Meiss, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini,
and Filippo Menczer, “Detecting and Tracking Political Abuse in Social Media,” Proceedings of the
Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Barcelona, Spain: Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2011), 297-304; Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin
Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu, “The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money,”
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (Orlando, Florida, USA: May
2011).
5 Teresa Correa, Amber Willard Hinsley, and Homero Gil De Zuniga, “Who interacts on the Web?
The intersection of users’ personality and social media use,” Computers in Human Behavior 26, no. 2
(2010), 247-253; W. Lance Bennett, “The Personalization of Politics: Political Identity, Social Media,
and Changing Patterns of Participation,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
644, no. 1 (2012): 20-39; W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective
Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics,” Information, Communication &
Society 15, no. 5 (2012), 739-768.
6 Sascha D. Meinrath, James W. Losey, and Victor W. Pickard, “Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and
Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide,” CommLaw Conspectus 19 (2010); Peter
Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (New York, NY:
The New Press, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: International Publishers, 1932
(1845)).
8 Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996); Rodney H. Hilton, “Peasant Society, Peasant Movements and Feudalism in Medieval
Europe,” Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change, ed. Henry A. Landsberger (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1974), 67-94.
9 Linda Gottschalk-Stuckrath, “Medieval Monks and Their World: Ideas and Realities. Studies in
Honor of Richard E. Sullivan,” Church History and Religious Culture 87, no. 3 (2007), 375-376.
10 Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Feudalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1942).
11 Ole Wæver, Securitization (London: Routledge, 2011); Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and
Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
12 Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no.
2 (2000): 33-58; Christian Fuchs, “Dallas Smythe Reloaded: Critical Media and Communication
Studies Today,” The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media,

fall/winter 2017 | 141

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

ed. Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers, 2014), 267-389;
Andreas Wittel, “Digital Marx: Toward a political economy of distributed media,” TripleC 10, no.
2 (2012); Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 174-
180; Nikolai Bezroukov, “Open source software development as a special type of academic research:
Critique of vulgar Raymondism,” First Monday 4, no. 10 (1999); Milton Mueller, “Info-communism?
Ownership and freedom in the digital economy,” First Monday 13, no. 4 (2008); Richard Barbrook,
“Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are Superseding Capitalism in Cyberspace,” Science as
Culture 9, no. 1 (2000), 5-40; David Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital
Age (Berlin: Springer, 2016), 119-131.
13 Kevin Kelly, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online,” Wired Magazine
17, no. 6 (2009); Max Raskin and David Yermack, “Digital Currencies, Decentralized Ledgers, and
the Future of Central Banking” (Working Paper No. w22238, National Bureau of Economic Research,
2016); Alberto Romele and Marta Severo, “The Economy of the Digital Gift: From Socialism to
Sociality Online,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (2016), 43-63; Todd Wolfson, Digital Rebellion: The
Birth of the Cyber Left (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 134-141.
14 Herbert Kitschelt, “Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies: Theoretical
Propositions,” Party Politics 1, no. 4 (1995), 447-472; Michael Woolcock, “Social capital and eco-
nomic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework,” Theory and Society 27,
no. 2 (1998), 151-208; Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, “Explaining Political and Economic
Change in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Old Legacies, New Institutions, Hegemonic Norms, and
International Pressures,” Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 2 (1995), 171-199.
15 Vasilis Kostakis, “Peer governance and Wikipedia: Identifying and understanding the problems
of Wikipedia’s governance,” First Monday 15, no. 3 (2010); Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement,
Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 171-185.
16 Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of
Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977), 1-27.
17 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review 64 (1970),
13.
18 Herbert A. Simon, “Rationality as process and as product of thought,” American Economic Review
(1978), 1-16.
19 Graham Murdock, “Citizens, consumers and public culture,” Media Cultures: Reappraising
Transnational Media, ed. Michael Skovmand and Kim Christian Schrøder (New York, NY: Routledge,
1992), 41.
20 Max Horkheimer, “The end of reason,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9, no. 3 (1941), 366-388;
Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda,” Psyche: Zeitschrift für
Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 24, no. 7 (1970), 486-509.
21 Herbert Marcuse, “Some social implications of modern technology,” Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science 9, no. 3 (1941), 414-439.
22 George Lukács, “Technology and social relations,” New Left Review 39 (1966), 27.
23 Christian Fuchs, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (London: Taylor & Francis,
2011).
24 Dal Yong Jin, “The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalisation Era,” Marx in the
age of digital capitalism, ed. Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 322-349.
25 Les Back, Michael Keith, and John Solomos, “Technology, Race and Neofascism in a Digital
Age: The New Modalities of Racist Culture 1,” Patterns of Prejudice 30, no. 2 (1996), 3-27;
Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2008); Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Networked Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 22, no.
2 (2011), 32-46; Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of
the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2010); Daniel Calingaert,
“Authoritarianism vs. the Internet,” Policy Review 160 (2010); Philip N. Howard, The Digital Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
26 Elizaveta Gaufman, “World War II 2.0: Digital Memory of Fascism in Russia in the Aftermath
of Euromaidan in Ukraine,” Journal of Regional Security 10, no. 1 (2015), 17-36; Eva Anduiza Perea,
Michael James Jensen, and Laia Jorba, eds., Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

142 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

27 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Penguin Books 1977);
Georges Canguilhem, Machine and Organism (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992).
28 Benito Mussolini Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928), quoted in Fritz Morstein
Marx, “Propaganda and Dictatorship,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 179
(1935), 211–218.
29 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Berlin:
Springer, 2007); Jeffrey Herf, “Reactionary Modernism: Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of
Politics in the Third Reich,” Theory and Society 10, no. 6 (1981), 805-832.
30 Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the problem of Fascism
(Brooklyn, NY: New Left Books, 1974).
31 Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995.
32 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New
York, NY: Routledge, 2013).
33 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1981); https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/archive/morgenthau/268.
34 Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2017); Anita R. Gohdes, “Studying the Internet and Violent conflict,” Conflict
Management and Peace Science 35, no. 1 (2018), 89-106; Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes, Cyberpolitics:
Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999).
35 Philip N Howard, Sheetal D. Agarwal, and Muzammil M. Hussain, “When Do States Disconnect
Their Digital Networks? Regime Responses to the Political Uses of Social Media,” Communication
Review 14, no. 3 (2011), 216-232; Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, “Political Change in
the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing,” SAIS Review of International Affairs
30, no. 2 (2010), 37-49; Nivien Saleh, “Egypt’s Digital Activism and the Dictator’s Dilemma: An
evaluation,” Telecommunications Policy 36, no. 6 (2012), 476-483; Charlie Edwards and Luke Gribbon,
“Pathways to Violent Extremism in the Digital Era,” RUSI Journal 158, no. 5 (2013), 40-47; Cristina
Archetti, “Terrorism, Communication and New Media: Explaining Radicalization in the Digital
Age,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 1 (2015); Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, “The Digital Disruption-
Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power,” Foreign Affairs 89 (2010); Gabriella Coleman, “Hacker
Politics and Publics,” Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011), 511-516.
36 Arne Hintz and Ian Brown, “Enabling Digital Citizenship? The Reshaping of Surveillance
Policy After Snowden,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017), 20; Gary King, Jennifer Pan,
and Margaret E. Roberts. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences
Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (2013), 326-343; Jennifer Pan,
“How Market Dynamics of Domestic and Foreign Social Media Firms Shape Strategies of Internet
Censorship,” Problems of Post-Communism 64, no. 3-4 (2017), 167-188; Espen Geelmuyden Rød and Nils
B. Weidmann, “Empowering activists or autocrats? The Internet in authoritarian regimes,” Journal
of Peace Research 52, no. 3 (2015), 338-351; Sean Richey and Junyan Zhu, “Internet Access Does Not
Improve Political Interest, Efficacy, and Knowledge for Late Adopters,” Political Communication 32, no.
3 (2015), 396-413; Josephine B. Schmitt, Christina A. Debbelt, and Frank M. Schneider, “Too much
information? Predictors of information overload in the context of online news exposure,” Information,
Communication & Society (April 2017), 1-17; Christian Grimme, Mike Preuss, Lena Adam, and Heike
Trautmann, “Social Bots: Human-Like by Means of Human Control?” Big Data 5, no. 4 (2017),
279-293; Katina Michael, “Bots Trending Now: Disinformation and Calculated Manipulation of the
Masses,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 36, no. 2 (2017), 6-11; Yini Zhang, Chris Wells, Song
Wang, and Karl Rohe, “Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition
and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election,” New Media
& Society 10 (2017); Eric Jardine, “Tor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online
anonymity-granting technologies,” New Media & Society (2016); Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt,
“The online stolen data market: disruption and intervention approaches,” Global Crime 18, no. 1
(2017), 11-30; Nathalie Maréchal, “Networked Authoritarianism and the Geopolitics of Information:
Understanding Russian Internet Policy,” Media and Communication 5, no. 1 (2017); Jason Gainous,
Kevin M. Wagner, and Charles E. Ziegler, “Digital media and political opposition in authoritarian
systems: Russia’s 2011 and 2016 Duma elections,” Democratization (2017), 1-18.
37 David Lyon, “Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, Consequences, Critique,” Big
Data & Society 1, no. 2 (2014); Christopher G. Reddick, Akemi Takeoka Chatfield, and Patricia
A. Jaramillo, “Public opinion on National Security Agency surveillance programs: A multi-method
approach,” Government Information Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2015), 129-141.

fall/winter 2017 | 143

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

38 Emiliano Treré, “The Dark Side of Digital Politics: Understanding the Algorithmic Manufacturing
of Consent and the Hindering of Online Dissidence,” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 47,
no. 1 (2016); Emiliano Treré and Veronica Barassi, “Net-authoritarianism? How web ideologies rein-
force political hierarchies in the Italian 5 Star Movement,” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies
3, no. 3 (2015), 287-304; Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s networked authoritarianism”; Katy E.
Pearce and Sarah Kendzior, “Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan,” Journal
of Communication 62, no. 2 (2012), 283-298; Luca Anceschi, “The persistence of media control under
consolidated authoritarianism: containing Kazakhstan’s digital media,” Demokratizatsiya 23, no. 3
(2015), 277-295; Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard, “What Best Explains Successful
Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring,” International Studies Review 15, no.
1 (2013), 48-66.
39 Greg Allen and Taniel Chan, “Artificial Intelligence and National Security” (Belfer Center Paper,
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University,
2017); Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The ethics of artificial intelligence,” Cambridge
Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 316-334.
40 Brent Mittelstadt, Daniel, Patrick Allo, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Sandra Wachter, and Luciano
Floridi, “The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate,” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016); Luciano
Floridi, The Philosophy of Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
41 Zeynep Tufekci, “Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics,”
First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014); Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Networked Authoritarianism”; Daniel
Calingaert, “Authoritarianism vs. the Internet,” Policy Review 160 (2010); Jack Copeland, Artificial
Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015).
42 Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, “Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images,” arXiv (2016),
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135.
43 “Facebook and Google Helped Anti-Refugee Campaign in Swing States,” Bloomberg, 18 October
2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/facebook-and-google-helped-anti-refugee-
campaign-in-swing-states.
44 Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Chris Russell, “Counterfactual Explanations Without
Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology
(forthcoming, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3063289). For a recent exposition of this argu-
ment, see Zeynep Tufekci, “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads,” TED Talks,
September 2017; https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_
make_people_click_on_ads.
45 Subhankar Bhattacharya, Edward Scott, and Magan Arthur, “The phoenix rises from the ashes:
Advertising and content monetization in a digital world,” Journal of Digital Asset Management 2, no. 6
(2006), 269-278; Jose Tomas Gomez-Arias and Larisa Genin, “Beyond Monetization: Creating Value
through Online Social Networks,” International Journal of Electronic Business Management 7, no. 2 (2009),
79-85.
46 Andrew Chadwick, “Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity,” Political
Communication 24, no. 3 (2007), 283-301.
47 Markus Prior, “Media and Political Polarization,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013),
101-127; Bruce Bimber, “Digital Media in the Obama Campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to
the Personalized Political Communication Environment,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics
11, no. 2 (2014), 130-150; W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar, “A New Era of Minimal Effects?
The Changing Foundations of Political Communication,” Journal of Communication 58, no. 4 (2008),
707-731.
48 Samuel C. Woolley, “Automating power: Social bot interference in global politics,” First Monday
21, no. 4 (2016); Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard, “Political Communication, Computational
Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents—Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016).
49 Astrid Mager, “Algorithmic ideology: How capitalist society shapes search engines,” Information,
Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012), 769-787.
50 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA:
MIT press, 2000).
51 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).

144 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Digital Challenges to Democracy

52 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
53 Craig Calhoun, “Community Without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and
the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere,” Sociological Inquiry 68, no. 3 (1998), 373-397.
54 Shelley Boulianne, “Does Internet use affect engagement? A meta-analysis of research,” Political
Communication 26, no. 2 (2009), 193-211; Michael Xenos and Patricia Moy, “Direct and Differential
Effects of the Internet on Political and Civic Engagement,” Journal of Communication 57, no. 4 (2007),
704-718; Caroline J. Tolbert and Ramona S. McNeal, “Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on
Political Participation?” Political Research Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2003), 175-185; Kate Kenski and
Natalie Jomini Stroud, “Connections Between Internet Use and Political Efficacy, Knowledge, and
Participation,” Journal Broadcasting & Electronic Media 50, no. 2 (2006), 173-192.
55 Eva Anduiza Perea, Michael James Jensen, and Laia Jorba, eds., Digital Media and Political
Engagement Worldwide: A Comparative Study; Jennifer Oser, Marc Hooghe, and Sofie Marien, “Is Online
Participation Distinct from Offline Participation? A Latent Class Analysis of Participation Types and
Their Stratification,” Political Research Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2013), 91-101.
56 Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic
Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash” (Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper No. RWP16-026,
Harvard University, Boston, MA: 2017) (available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818659).
57 Michael Xenos, Ariadne Vromen, and Brian D. Loader, “The great equalizer? Patterns of social
media use and youth political engagement in three advanced democracies,” Information, Communication
& Society 17, no. 2 (2014), 151-167.
58 Rachel K. Gibson, “Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning,”
Party Politics 21, no. 2 (2015), 183-197.
59 Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Logan Molyneux, and Pei Zheng, “Social Media, Political Expression,
and Political Participation: Panel Analysis of Lagged and Concurrent Relationships,” Journal of
Communication 64, no. 4 (2014), 612-634; Leticia Bode, Emily K. Vraga, Porismita Borah, and Dhavan
V. Shah, “A New Space for Political Behavior: Political Social Networking and Its Democratic
Consequences,” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 19, no. 3 (2014), 414-429; Nakwon Jung,
Yonghwan Kim, and Homero Gil de Zúniga, “The Mediating Role of Knowledge and Efficacy in the
Effects of Communication on Political Participation,” Mass Communication and Society 14, no. 4 (2011),
407-430.
60 Scott A. Hale, Helen Margetts, and Taha Yasseri, “Petition growth and success rates on the
UK No. 10 Downing Street website,” Proceedings of the 5th Annual Association for Computing Machinery
Web Science Conference (Paris, France: May 2013); R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, and Alexander
H. Trechsel, “Internet Voting in Comparative Perspective: the Case of Estonia,” PS: Political Science
& Politics 42, no. 3 (2009), 497-505; Finnish Open Ministry, openministry.info; Francis Augusto
Medeiros and Lee A. Bygrave, “Brazil’s Marco Civil da Internet: Does it live up to the hype?” Computer
Law & Security Review 31, no. 1 (2015), 120-130.
61 Sarah Perez, “Facebook officially launches ‘Town Hall’ for contacting government reps, adds
local election reminders,” TechCrunch, 27 March 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/27/facebook-
officially-launches-town-hall-for-contacting-government-reps-adds-local-election-reminders/.
62 Cristian Vaccari, Augusto Valeriani, Pablo Barberá, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua
A. Tucker, “Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement among
German and Italian Users of Twitter,” Social Media and Society 2, no. 3 (2016).
63 Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented?
A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and
Duplication,” Journal of Communication 67, no. 4 (2017), 476-498.
64 Michael A. Beam and Gerald M. Kosicki, “Personalized News Portals: Filtering Systems and
Increased News Exposure,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 91, no. 1 (2014), 59-77.
65 Flux Party, voteflux.org/; Orly Linovski and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, “Evolution of Urban
Design Plans in the United States and Canada: What Do the Plans Tell Us about Urban Design
Practice?” Journal of Planning Education and Research 33, no. 1 (2013), 66-82; Noe Jacomet, “How the g0v
movement is forking the Taiwanese government,” Medium, 13 April 2017, https://medium.com/open-
source-politics/how-the-g0v-movement-is-forking-the-taiwanese-government-74b7cce0e92b; Haroon
Siddique, “Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution,” The Guardian, 9 June 2011, https://

fall/winter 2017 | 145

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
H. Akin Unver

www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/09/iceland-crowdsourcing-constitution-facebook.
66 Helen Margetts, “The Internet and Democracy,” Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. William
H. Dutton (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013); Andrew Chadwick, The Hybrid Media System:
Politics and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

146 | Journal of International Affairs

This content downloaded from

193.61.207.166 on Thu, 23 May 2024 19:33:35 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms