A Short Reflection on Political Discourse in the Digital Era

Harms caused to online political discourse possess much greater power than prior ones thanks to internet and algorithms.

Internet and algorithms reinforce people's political biases through the effect of "echo chamber and filter bubble" (Sumpter,2018). Echo chamber refers to that people tend to only listen to voices echo to their own mind-sets or viewpoints, especially when they're networking online. For instance, political parties, as an online community or group, prefer to follow up news or information relevant to their political interests. Filter bubble is that recommendation algorithms or search algorithms can filter information based on user's browsing habits, so that people live in the filtered information bubble, exposed to information calculated by algorithms as 'wanted'. In this case, voices from the other parties or sides  won't come into one's bubble, thereafter people's political biases are reinforced.

Social media is used to fuel hate speech which has led to tragedies such as the genocide against the Rohingya (Warofka 2018), while the media platform was held no accountability (Nyabola, 2019).  When monopolistic social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are used around the world, language becomes the new boarder and barrier to communication.  Living in echo chamber and filter bubble, plus the language barrier, people cannot understand each other properly. This is part of the reason why misinformation and disinformation can fool people. But in fact, alleged evidence for widely-spreading misinformation is published from small channels (Abilov et al., 2021) and probably fabricated by political groups. At the same time, conspiracy theories are more believed than scientific ones because science is factual and lacks drama (Sumpter, 2018). Globally famous presses can also be stained or manipulated by politics. BBC, for example, now is being accused by China of  spreading lies about Xinjiang genocide.  Based on my understanding as a Chinese, I personally believe the Xinjiang genocide is something never would or will happen in my country. However, I might be wrong and might be fooled by potential misinformation in my own country. There is the possibility that BBC is genuinely integrate, committing to finding out the truth and fighting for Xinjiang people's human rights.  Either Chinese people or BBC is fooled by misinformation in this situation. But politics is surely playing a salient role in this game.

Further, private company and political interest groups can manipulate foreign election campaigns by measuring electorates' trust levels and digestion of political information based on data analyses (Nyabola, 2019). Foreign intervene into domestic affairs could stir the global geopolitical ecology in favour of great powers at the costs of small countries. With the advent of internet, algorithms, and data analyses, the political world is much more complicated than what we actually hear and see.

References:

Abilov, A., Hua, Y., Matatov, H., Amir, O., & Naaman, M. (2021). VoterFraud2020: A Multi-modal Dataset of Election Fraud Claims on Twitter. ArXiv:2101.08210 [Cs]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08210

Nanjala Nyabola. (2019). Platform Governance of Political Speech. October 28.

Sumpter, David. (2018). "Bubbling Up, Outnumbered", from Facebook and Google to fake news and filter-bubbles - the algorithms that control our lives.