5 October, 2021 Daniel Zdolsek

GSD Assignment 2 Globala Studier, Göteborgs Universitet

Cyber Security and Perspectives on Democracy

During the last decade the digitization of communication has introduced new challenges for
democratic societies. With social media platforms today offering powerful tools to influence
public opinion, governments are struggling in their response to both targeted attacks and
randomized misinformation. This has developed a multistakeholder approach with delegated
censorships where large online actors are expected to manage and moderate content on
their own platforms. At the same time both technological and legislative measures are put in
place to govern the Internet but the task to avoid infringements on individual democratic rights
has proven difficult.

Elections have become the epicentre of democracy’s evolving challenges, with several
results over the last half decade attributed to online influence campaigns. In this development
British election management agency Cambridge Analytica got synonymous with a
psychographic approach of gaining political power through targeted communication and
psychological profiling. National enquiries and massive negative media attention sent the
company into bankruptcy but no individual sentences were passed which indicates the
complexity around regulating influence and election interference.

Interrelated to the development online is an increasingly partisan and polarized context both
in society in general and more specifically in traditional media. Broadcasters have in some
countries long run biased political agendas and continue to do so without interruption,
complicating further the logic around regulation influence.
With the political developments of the last decade in hindsight, it would almost seem that
elective representative democracy, as it has developed in Western societies, is optimized to
be rigged by the tools of communication that have been introduced in recent years. Or
perhaps is rather liberal capitalism driving a technical evolution which promotes business
models that thrive in free and deregulated societies, but whose applications and
functionalities are inherently toxic to its host given certain circumstances. 1 2 3 In any case is
the political system of liberal parliamentarism that has served the West so fortunately up till
now suddenly well on its way to not only undermine itself, but to completely implode under
its own very foundations. The question is of course if there is anything in the democratic tool
box to amend the situation? Can a system which relies so heavily on the continuous
reevaluation of power, elective representation and expressive freedoms, survive a situation
where these institutions are both subject to the assault and enabling the attack?

This essay will look at how democracy turned so apparently vulnerable and what measures
that are put in place to defend it. Since this is a problem of inextricably technological nature,
cyber security constitutes one aspect in democracy’s line of defense. Software solutions
that by automatic commands will filter out and block off unwanted traffic, ranging from
offensive language to targeted attempts of subversion. The other dimension of defensive
measures is the circumscription of freedoms of expression online. The right to express
opinions and distribute content is here limited by either legal means or corporate policy
controls. Restrictions on information that, although limited to the digital domain, inevitably
result in a gradual dismantling of what is regarded as fundamental democratic characteristics.
Together these implementations by public sector and private interests to govern the Internet
through various control mechanisms has been termed multistakeholderism. 4 5 6 7

THE BACKSIDE OF PROGRESS

At the heart of democracy’s evolving challenges are the technical advances made in the field
of communication, the majority of these taking substantial effect at various points during the
last decade. As important however, is the fact that democratic systems’ consistent
processes of public selection for positions of executive power and its dependence on a free
and unregulated public debate, mean it is highly vulnerable to attempts to influence it. This
is nothing new, intelligence agencies and foreign affairs departments in countries with
international ambitions of power have attempted and succeeded with such activities
throughout the modern era. But what is different today is the scale and speed by which
these institutions can be influenced and also that new technology has invited completely
new actors into the game.8 9 10 11

The big gamechanger was the introduction of social media. With an increasing number of
people globally connected on digital communication platforms, completely new opportunities
for interaction was established. Not only could selective messaging be targeted in ways
which was never possible through broadcast or print media, the information could also be
amplified in discussions and on forums where similar-minded groups echoed each other’s
opinions. A privatized, rationalized and optimized ecosystem of communication where
suddenly anyone with enough time and dedication could achieve the same level of impact
on opinion that previously was reserved only for professional agencies. Also, it could be
made with only a small fraction of the financial resources that was once used. In line with the
platforms’ business models, it could even generate resources to produce engaging content.
The tech giants’ founding vision of connecting the world and everyone in it would not only
bring revolutionary benefits but also some unwanted consequences. 12 13

The Macedonian town of Veles for example, used to have little to do with American politics.
Still it got enough involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for Hilary Clinton to
suggest some of its inhabitants must be working with Russian agents. In fact, most pointed
towards a reality a lot less dramatic, but for Clinton just as troublesome. Specializing in
producing engaging online content, the town had become an industry hotspot for the
creation of Facebook ads. And when it became clear to the Macedonian producers that
American politics generated far more clicks than cars and healthcare, they quickly switched
fields to focus on sensational fake news. At one point one of these Facebook pages had
1.5 million followers and while most of what was posted there had nothing to do with fact
checked truth, the site could generate as much as 2.500 USD per day in click-based
revenues. 14 15
 CHALLENGES AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF REGULATING ONLINE SPACE
The Macedonian example should point to the intrinsic complexity of the online ecosystem
and how difficult it will be for the democratic system to regulatory adapt to its new digital
environment. While some of the challenges are products of the platforms’ business models,
others are windows of opportunities opened by the technological breakthroughs.16 Online
ads, as those described above, flourish in the geographical and regulatory vacuum that the
Internet provides. Bots, on the other hand, are automated software code tasked with much
of the objective necessities of a functioning online environment, representing close to half of
all internet traffic. When given a political purpose however, these applications deceive both
users and algorithms through manipulation and can cause extensive damage via the
Internet’s approval of anonymity. Another recurring problem is the lack of viable gatekeeping
functions with misinformation reaching target audiences with intended impact even if the
content is later taken down or branded with a disclaimer.17

Misinformation, whether driven by political or financial incentives, have come to dominate the
public debate around online challenges to democracy. Accentuated during the last two years
by the varying approaches to the Covid pandemic but also by Trump’s final year in office.
The tech giants’ response was to precede jurisdiction and implement their own standards
and regulations, irrespective of the consequential conflict with both freedom of expression
and the American president. As Twitter had become Trump’s go to channel for
communicating with both supporters and adversaries, pressure was mounting on the
platform to limit the impact of his posts. What started as disclaimers of “Glorification of
Violence” and “Get the Facts” eventually ended in a full suspension. The company was
heralded by many for the move but at the same time got criticized for both acting
undemocratically and on partisan merits. The Trump administration in response launched an
Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship which, although it had little effect, was a
telling sign of the complexity around online democratic legitimacy.18

Since 2016, which held both Trump’s win in the US presidential election and Leave’s
success in the Brexit referendum, tech platforms have been under hard scrutiny for their
alleged part in the unexpected results and have since implemented new policies on content
moderation, disinformation and political advertising. This development has to a large extent
been the result of a delegated censorship with governments putting the task of enforcing
regulation on the actors that are seen as responsible for the problem. Facebook, Twitter and
Google are by this expected to control their users’ content and limit its negative impacts.
While pushing this responsibility towards corporate interests however, the public sphere at
the same time is relieving themselves from the control of the democratic processes and
effectively, at least to some extent, is privatizing the continued democratization of their
societies.19 20

Even if the online platforms’ regulations automatically get a global effect, there are national
variations in legislative implementations indicating that not all governments view this issue the
same way. France for example has applied expedited judicial mechanisms to force removal
of offending or misleading content while Germany, with their NetzDG law, has made
platforms liable for disturbing and dangerous content after an issued warning. At the core of
such regulations, both on the corporate and public sides, is the complexity of defining what
dangerous/disturbing/misleading/offending content actually is – but also who should be held
responsible for the publication of that content.21

FROM OPEN COMMONS TO NORMATIVE REGRESSION

This question goes back to the Internet’s youth when the evolving technology was thought
of in terms of an “open commons”. The ambition was to treat it as an exclusive legal space,
resistant to any singular government’s control, much like the Convention of the High Seas
ensuring equal rights to international waters. Deliberate decisions were taken by key
institutions in the 1990’s to leave the World Wide Web free to flourish by its own technical
and economic opportunities. Instead of juridical regulations, the early Internet hence came
to be managed by commonly agreed principals in a manner of network neutrality. This
safeguarded the rights and possibilities of both users and providers, but in turn offered little
in regards to disciplinary measures or further thought to abuses of the system. The right of
users to access content, services and applications on the Internet without interference from
network operators or government and the right of network operators to be reasonably free of
liability for transmitting content and applications deemed illegal or undesirable by third parties
in combination effectively freed all involved parties involved from responsibility, left
governments unarmed and with time proved to leave democratic systems exposed to
interests with malicious intent.22 23

The development since then can be described as a normative regression where attempts
have been made to regain control of the Internet. This initiated an interlinked development
where digital solutions were designed in relation to the territorial-based requests on control
that were introduced. 24 Accentuated through the sort of multistake governance discussed
at different points above, both corporate action and statutory jurisdiction were implemented
with the intent of retroactively inserting traditional judicial regimes into the digital
communicative online space that previously had been largely unregulated. 25 26

TOWARDS A REGULATING GOVERNANCE

The mechanisms used to achieve this inevitably must differ from conventional tools of state
control where measures had to be adapted to a fast-paced field in constant progress with
widely varying challenges. These include bot accounts and related automated commands,
deliberate disinformation and fake news, targeted advertising and propaganda operations.27
But while legislative processes have fallen short or turned out ineffective in addressing these
challenges, the fall-back on technical solutions are also struggling. Authenticating and
identifying users in a global networked environment centered around anonymity have proven
highly complex, especially as the direct blocking of user access is considered an
infringement of democratic rights and freedom of speech.28

Increasingly however, technical advancements have made possible for the online industry to
offer governments and platforms more fine-grained selectivity in governing the Internet. What
was previously impossible in terms of deep packet inspection and large-scale keyword-
based filtering can increasingly be achieved through enhanced software. Still, more heavy-
handed methods have remained in use, not the least by autocratic regimes less concerned
with popular consent. One of these is Just-in-time Blocking, where parts of the network is
temporarily shut down, while Active Defense is another which describes the take-down of
offending network nodes, enabling hostile traffic at its source.29 30
Online surveillance is yet another aspect of the Internet’s profound impact on society and
citizens’ rights in a digitized context. As governments aim to evade both physical and digital
threats, the threshold for personal integrity is inevitably being challenged. And while some
countries have prioritized control with little or no respect for individual democratic rights,
others are being more cautious with less options to monitor the digital space related to its
citizens.31 The case of Mark Snowden shows however that not all government activity of this
kind is fully disclosed to the society being monitored.

THE ISSUE OF INFLUENCE

At this point the issue of digitized global communication raises many questions that still need
answers. A lot of future research in this field depends on data owned by the large platforms
and it is up to them whether academics will gain access to it. 32 An interesting line of studies
have however started to look at the impact of online influence and whether it could be said
to have a verified effect on public opinion.33 34 35 36 37 In this field, two camps have started to
emerge with distinctly contravening perspectives. While one of them emphasizes the
efficiency of digital channels to influence opinion through social media, in echo chambers,
with automated propaganda and the mass spread of fake news – the other points to the fact
that traditional broadcast media still hold a strong position in many societies and that the
relevance of novel technology in this regard is overrated. 38 39 40 What most studies seem to
agree on however is that the overall level of influence has increased since the introduction
of digital communication and that the efforts to sway public discourse is becoming a pressing
topic for a wide range of different political systems. 41

Connected to this is the discussion on foreign interference and what countries are doing to
limit its impact. The findings from enquiries launched to investigate the results of several
elections over the last half decade have been alarming but perhaps not very surprising. While
the Mueller Report on foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election found
Russian influence to be in sweeping and systematic fashion, the UK House of Commons
2019 Report on Disinformation and Fake News concluded that British electoral law is unfit
for purpose and does not function satisfactory in current circumstances. Significant here is
that although the American investigation resulted in a handful of guilty pleas, none of them
were in direct connection to any actual election interference.42 43 44
 THE CASE OF CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
In the British case, a lot of effort was put on investigating the methods of election
management agency Cambridge Analytica, a London based company which over the last
10 years had been involved in political campaigning on a global scale. After having improved
their methods on successful contracts in Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, the U.S. and
several other countries, the firm were at the time of the Brexit referendum openly advertising
their target audience analysis methodology as the most efficient way to win votes and gain
political power. 45 46
With a social engineering toolkit they offered clients the opportunity to
approach elections from a psychographic perspective. Through behavioural science,
addressable ad tech and data analytics, the electorate would be targeted with messaging
optimized for their psychological profile and in that way their behaviour could allegedly be
influenced.47 48 Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix, described in both public lectures
and marketing online videos how his company had managed to create a psychological profile
of every adult American and that the volume of data it was based on came from a dedicated
personality test, voluntarily taken by Facebook users.49 50
That his words did not cause
concern at the time points to the fact that few people, if any, realized the paradigmatic shift
that was already under way in the world of electoral politics. It would take two more elections,
with outcomes that profoundly upset the projected forecasts, before the losing sides and
their entourage realized that they had been in the game on an unlevel playing field.

Still, since the most severe juridical fallout from the case around Cambridge Analytica was a
26,000 USD civil fine, it must be concluded that it, by current legislative standards, is
immensely difficult to claim personal accountability based on the activities the company was
running.51 Its services might have been highly immoral, but the staff were apparently not
acting in what could be considered a criminal manner. The fact that the vacuum created by
Cambridge Analytica’s bankruptcy was filled by several other companies openly marketing
the very same services, should support that argument.52 53 On the other hand, Facebook
was heavily fined by several national regulators (Brazil, UK, U.S., etc.) for its involvement in
the affair, among them a record 5 billion USD penalty issued by the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission, which also added restrictions that will hold the company accountable for the
decisions it makes about its users’ privacy.54 55 56 Google, on their part, also faces numerous
pending antitrust lawsuits in the U.S., there related to their advertising products.57
Looking at the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica’s connection to the Trump and Brexit
campaigns as a precedent, it is a clear signal that the principle of delegated censorship puts
the overwhelming responsibility of monitoring content on their own platforms in the hands of
the operators. It is also a sign that governments are prepared to punish them if they fail to
comply with that job. A recent agreement on future cooperation between EU and U.S.
lawmakers on platform gatekeeper functions and online intermediary responsibility to
safeguard democratic processes only strengthens this development. 58

ONLINE REGULATIONS AND BROADCAST RIGHTS

This praxis in one respect puts the platforms on par with distributors and publishers in
general, would a newspaper print an offensive article it could expect to get disciplined for it.
On the other hand, mainstream media have been running partisan agendas for decades and
continue to do so without interruption. Looking at broadcasts of U.S. private news networks
(CNN, FOX News, etc), it might be difficult to grasp why the issue of influence suddenly have
become such a sensitive topic. Yes, their political ads are subject to campaign finance
controls but the tone and message in the editorial content on these channels are often just
as polarizing. Add to this that FOX News, and many other TV channels, have foreign
ownership and the matter makes even less sense. In the case of CGTN and Russia Today
for example, dedicated foreign national interests are broadcasted to the American public on
a daily basis.59 60 61

LOOKING AHEAD
It seems so that the task of defining and regulating influence will be enormously difficult
without repeating the same political behaviour that is already restricting public life through
foreign agent acts in for example Hungary and Russia.62 63 It also puts the entire concept of
foreign interference to some extent in question, as the matter eventually seems decided by
who currently is holding the moral high ground. 64
Cambridge Analytica, with all its
involvement in U.S. politics, was not investigated in their function of a foreign agent, however
it was discussed whether the Macedonian content producers mentioned above, could have
had their Facebook ads financed by Russian interests. To juridically navigate scenarios with
multiple actors of different nationalities involved, all operating in a glocal context where native
parties already have highly partisan agendas, will most likely prove difficult.65 In that sense,
implementable legislation that effectively controls foreign involvement while at the same time
respects democratic rights, seems distant. At the same time, delegated censorships have
proven sensitive to accusations of political bias while technological restrictive measures
continue to struggle against enabling innovations on the other side of the firewall.

Perhaps then, is the only remaining way forward for democracy, if we want it to coexist with
digital communication and online platforms, to completely deregulate the playing field.
Legitimize all methods of influence coming from any direction and in that way at least have
all information compete for the audience’s attention on equal terms. That line of thought
corresponds to the idea of releasing the ban on doping in athletics, the comparison voiced
by Cambridge Analytica whistle blower Cristopher Wylie.66 More recent criticism comes
from former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen who, armed with thousands of
documents from her time at the company, testified on October 5th at an Internet security
hearing before the U.S. Congress. Her claims that the company is down-prioritizing its
responsibilities around safety and the wellbeing of both users and society will strengthen
the case that tech giants are not doing enough to fulfil their obligations. "The company's
leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the
necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,"
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