Politics and Technology in the Post-Truth Era

Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787569850
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have directly impacted the way in which politics operates today. Bringing together research on Europe, the US, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, this book examines the relationship between ICT and politics in a global perspective. Technological innovations such as big data, data mining, sentiment analysis, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, social media and blockchain technology are reshaping the way ICT intersects with politics and in this collection contributors examine these developments, demonstrating their impact on the political landscape. Chapters examine topics such as cyberwarfare and propaganda, post-Soviet space, Snowden, US national security, e-government, GDPR, democratization in Africa and internet freedom. Providing an overview of new research on the emerging relationship between the promise and potential inherent in ICT and its impact on politics, this edited collection will prove an invaluable text for students, researchers and practitioners working in the fields of Politics, International Relations and Computer Science.

Chapter 1

Politics and ICT: Issues, Challenges, Developments

Anna Visvizi and Miltiadis D. Lytras

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

(Schwab, 2017)

Technological advances have been altering the dynamics of social interaction and societal processes ever since, with each subsequent industrial revolution bringing about new implications for our societies and economies, and thus for the political process and politics. The nature and scale of technological advances that influence socio-political and economic landscapes today make the correlation between technology and society seemingly more complex, more pervasive, and more challenging to comprehend (Visvizi et al., 2018; Ordóñez de Pablos & Lytras, 2018; Pérez-delHoyo, et al., 2018). Indeed, the context in which contemporary socio-political processes unfold defies easy categorizations. In many instances, the scale, the multivaried nature, and the pace of developments in world politics and economics make it challenging to identify the causal relationship behind them on the spot. Given the pace of information diffusion these days, in absence of imminent evidence-based explanations, room is created for perceptions and opinions to step in the debate and effectively crowd out objective facts.

Touted as “post-truth”, this specific condition characterizing contemporary politics and society has been defined in a number of ways, sparkling a vivid debate in academia and elsewhere (D’Ancona, 2017; McIntire, 2018; Lewandowsky et al, 2017; Rochlin, 2017). In brief, it denotes the condition in which appearances are given priority over objectivity, and so interpretations, emotional and subjective assessments and evaluations cloud the essence of things and so the truth. What is particularly worrying are the implications of the prevalence of assumptions and unfounded interpretations for the social and political processes. A case can be made that by viewing the reality through the prism of frequently misjudged assumptions, rather than through the lens of objectivity, leads the members of our societies to a self-assuring oblivion, self-complacency and muted alertness to pressing needs and challenges that our societies face (Visvizi, 2018).

Considering the dialectical relationship between technological advances and post-truth, and the impact they have exert on politics and society today, the objective of this volume is to offer an insight into “the what,” “the how,” and the “to what end” pertinent in the discussion on information and communication technologies (ICT) and politics at macro-, mezzo-, and micro-levels of politics and policy making.

This edited volume brings together and discusses critically the well-established, emerging, and nascent concerns and questions related to the impact of ICT on our societies, especially on the field of politics. By embedding the discussion in a broad conceptual framework and reaching out to case studies, this volume offers a journey into technological advances and showcases how sophisticated technology impacts politics and the policy-making process around the world today. By integrating views and insights from several continents and by focusing on several issue areas, this edited volume serves as a primer on the emerging and contentious relationship between the promise and the potential ICT holds for politics.

The chapters included in this volume take a multi- and inter-disciplinary take on the role of ICT in shaping diverse layers of politics in its local, regional, and global outreach. Drawing on their extensive experience in academia, politics, and the think-tank sector, the authors contributing to this volume elaborate on the intricacies of technologies and paradigms that shape the field of technological innovation today such as the big data paradigm, data mining, data analytics, social media mining methodologies and sentiment analysis, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain technologies. These are then applied to real-life events and/or processes to demonstrate the inseparability of ICT and politics today. The authors contributing to this volume query the prospect and the potential related to open data, data analytics, and data mining for data-driven decision process in view of optimizing the performance of public administration and promoting a healthy relationship between the public and the private sector. The chapters included in this volume dwell also on a variety of issues bound to steer the debate on privacy in times of data mining. Moreover, drawing on the case of Snowden, questions of civic responsibility, safety, and national security are upheld. Fig. 1 mirrors the variety of topics and issues that the authors contributing to the volume have dealt with.

Fig. 1: Politics and Technology Word Cloud.

The chapters included in this volume pertain to all spheres of human interaction, including private life, wellbeing, civic engagement, as well as democracy. Questions of safety and security have been also examined carefully both in connection to citizens’ privacy and freedom from unauthorized use of their personal data and to questions of cyber warfare. Equally important in the debate in the volume have been questions of ethical dilemmas that the ICT and its use generate. The notion of the regulatory framework within which ICT and its impact on our societies unfolds has gained attention in the book too. Overall, the 19 chapters included in this volume have been grouped in three thematic parts covering democracy, security, and policy making. Fig. 2 offers an overview of the key topics and issues discussed in the volume.

The chapters included in this volume introduce the reader into a great number of case studies. Together, they mirror several of the most topical processes and trends that define the fields of domestic and international politics these days. Specifically, the following country case studies have been included in this volume, alphabetically: Angola Belarus, Brazil, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, China, Tunisia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. The authors upheld such topics as cyber warfare and propaganda, questions of surveillance in context of national security, issues pertaining to data collection and processing, also as seen from the regulatory perspective. The case of Snowden was discussed in detail, albeit from different perspectives in two chapters. E-government initiatives have been queried. The geographical focus of the discussion covered areas such as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Western Balkans, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, and Asia.

Fig. 2: Politics and ICT: Key Issues and Areas Influence.

Following this introduction, in Chapter 2 titled “From the Freedom of the Press to the Freedom of the Internet: A New Public Sphere in the Making?” Cláudia Toriz Ramos explores the synergies that emerge among ICT, democracy promotion, transparency, and the state-building process. By focusing on the cases of Tunisia, Egypt, Angola, and Zimbabwe, the author examines in which ways the internet, seen as a “public sphere” for processes of regime transition, may serve as a mean of promoting democracy and freedom of speech.

In Chapter 3, Marçal Mora-Cantallops, Zhengqi Yan, and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso discuss the patterns of political content diffusion in social networks. As the authors argue, over the past few years, ICT and social media have become increasingly relevant to politicians and political parties alike, often used to issue statements or campaigning, among others. At the same time, citizens have become more involved in politics, partly due to the highly interactive and social environments that the social networking services provide. Political events flow through these networks, influencing their users; such events, however, often start offline (outside the online platform) and are, therefore, difficult to track. Event studies, a methodology often used in financial and economic studies, can be translated to social networks to help modeling the effect of external events in the network. Accordingly, the event study methodology is applied to two cases, including the tariff war between the United States and China, with multiple responses and retaliations from both sides, and to the Brexit referendum.

In Chapter 4, titled “Contemporary Politics and Society: Social Media and Public Engagement in Belarus,” Victor Shadurski and Galina Malishevskaya employ the case of Belarus and the contradictions inherent in its socio-political model to showcase how the onset of the ICT and therefore the evolution of the means of spreading information amplifies these contradictions. To this end, the authors highlight the increased engagement of the state authorities in the online information domain. Interestingly, the authors elaborate as well how the remaining stakeholders, including opinion leaders, activists, and bloggers, can use the online information domain to make their cases. The chapter includes case studies detailing how exactly information technologies and online communication contribute to the formation of a new socio-political agenda in the country. The key examples relate to situations where, owing to extensive public engagement and support for online appeals, it became possible to use mechanisms of legitimate influence on government decision making and bring to account officials responsible for concealing information.

The following Chapter 5 adds to the discussion on social media by offering a more nuanced view of methodologies enabling targeted and purposeful use of social media as a tool of policy making. Indeed, in the chapter, titled “Modeling Public Mood and Emotion: Blog and News Sentiment and Politico-economic Phenomena,” Mu-Yen Chen, Min-Hsuan Fan, Ting-Hsuan Chen, and Ren-Pao Hsieh discuss the exploitation of advanced computational techniques, such as text mining and sentiment analysis in social media. By focusing on the value added of big data mining and analysis, the authors demonstrate how to use information otherwise contained to the spheres of political blogs and news articles to build a public mood prediction model. The authors focus specifically on the stock market and Taiwan. Clearly, selected insights from their research might well be employed in political analysis.

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in the European Union (EU) on May 25, 2018. Nikolaos Dimisianos, in his chapter titled “Political Campaigns, Social Media and Analytics: The Case of the GDPR,” discusses the impact of sophisticated technologies on political campaigns’ design, management, execution, and impact. The author examines in which ways social media, social media analytics, and disruptive technologies are combined and leveraged in political campaigns to increase the probability of victory through micro-targeting, voter engagement, and public relations. More specifically, the importance of community detection, social influence, natural language processing and text analytics, machine learning, and predictive analytics are assessed and reviewed in relation to political campaigns. Data processing is examined through the lens of the GDPR and its provisions. The author concludes that while data processing during political campaigns does not violate the GDPR, electoral campaigns engage in surveillance, thereby violating Articles 12 and 19, in respect to private life, and freedom of expression accordingly, as stated in the 1948s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From a slightly different angle, Chapter 7, titled “Assessing Compliance of Open Data in Politics with European Data Protection Regulation,” authored by Francesco Ciclosi, Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, and Donato De Ieso, examines the compliance of open data, as applied in politics, with the GDPR requirements. Particular attention in this context is paid to legal questions pertaining to the data processing procedures, including open data licenses and anonymization techniques.

Chapters 8 and 9 uphold the big question of government surveillance in the United States following the case of Snowden. Specifically, in Chapter 8, titled “ICT, Politics and Cyber Intelligence: Revisiting the Case of Snowden,” Emanuel Boussios investigates how cyber intelligence and cyber terrorism impact national security, surveillance, and privacy. The author focuses on a critical issue in cyber intelligence in the United States that concerns the engagement of state-owned, or state-controlled, entities with overseeing citizens’ activity in cyberspace. The emphasis in the discussion is placed on the constitutionality of state actions and the shifting boundaries in which the state can act in the name of security to protect its people from the nation’s enemies. The case of Snowden, discussed in this chapter, reveals the US government’s abuses of this surveillance machinery prompting major debates around the topics of privacy, national security, and mass digital surveillance. In a similar manner, in Chapter 9, titled “Government Surveillance, National Security, and the American Rights: Using Sentiment Analysis to Extract Citizen Opinions,” Lily Popova Zhuhadar, and Mark Ciampa, discuss the case of Snowden to examine citizens’ opinions about privacy and security.

Questions of national security and threat to national security born in cyberspace are the focus on the following chapter (Chapter 10). Aleksandra Kuczyn´ska-Zonik and Agata Tatarenko in their chapter titled “Information Security Risks in the Context of Russian Propaganda in the CEE” outline the problem of information security in Russia and CEE countries since the year 2000. The authors demonstrate the specifics of Russian propaganda in the CEE, which visibly poses a security threat to those countries. The authors present the evolution of Russian information policy, propaganda, its tools, and instruments, including traditional and social media.

In Chapter 11, titled “The ICT and its Uses: Fighting Corruption and Promoting Participatory Democracy – The Case of Romania,” Cristina Matiuta examines ICT, online communication, institutional transparency, anticorruption, and participatory tools as an integral approach to engaged citizenship. As the author argues, the Internet and digital technologies have become part of our life, essential for several daily activities and new powerful means of communication as well, able to invigorate the traditional forms of interaction between citizens and public institutions. The chapter examines their spread across the EU, and particularly in Romania, and their potential to promote transparency and accountability within the public institutions, to fight against corruption, and to expand citizens’ social mobilization. Even if Romania has much to do to provide quality onlin...