I have always been intrigued by the concept of unforeseen consequences. A reporter for Wired magazine wrote in 2000 that the internet would make us more "tolerant" and that "Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard — wiredness — as an organizing principle." Seventeen years later, we now know this isn't true. If anything, the internet has put us all in our own lonely bunkers, and we live in an age of aggressive tribalism and hyper-partisanship.
Another unforeseen consequence of our wired world is that our treasured electoral process is now vulnerable to manipulation from within and without. Because the internet is instantaneous, political movements can form in weeks — even days — and trigger rallies that, in the age of the civil rights movement, would have taken months to organize. Also, fake news items about candidates can spread like a virus and poison minds and sway opinions on the very eve of elections.
The internet seamlessly connects countries across the globe, but it also allows elections to leak beyond national borders, making tampering by unfriendly foreign powers possible. We now know that Russian military intelligence mounted a cyber attack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November's election. Almost a dozen state and local election systems, including Maryland's, reported "suspicious activity" and attempts to breach procedures that handle residents signing on to register to vote, update personal information and request absentee ballots.
What is utterly confounding to me is that President Donald Trump vacillates between calling this unprecedented attack "fake news" and admitting that the Russians indeed played a role. And then there's his beyond baffling tweet after his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany, that the U.S. and Russia planned a new "cybersecurity unit," although he then disavowed the idea via Twitter 12 hours later. Does such behavior betray complicity, dereliction of duty or stupidity? None of these choices is comforting. The Russians brazenly attacked our democratic system and attempted to interfere with election results. There's no doubt the "Russians are coming" again in November 2018, but Trump has yet to propose what the nation must do to protect itself against future assaults.
Elections are also impacted by the power of social media and Facebook can be weaponized. There is evidence that a foreign power attempted to sow disinterest in voting last November by using multiple postings claiming there was no real difference between Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. This technique might be more lethal than hyping fake news about a candidate because it cuts down on voting numbers, sending only the hyper-partisan to the polls.
Then there's Twitter. No matter how wrong or mean-spirited, tweets have the ability to call people to action and mold attitudes. Of course, you have to live in the Twitterverse to play, though those who elect not to can depend on the media to report every 140-word outburst.
The website Mashable estimates that the president has 31 million followers on Twitter. The more followers you have, the more you attract. However, though Trump has experienced a steady increase in followers over the past four months, experts believe this growth has been fueled by bots, i.e., automated followers. This is a common practice among celebrities to exaggerate the number of people interested in their electronic musings. Twitter Audit, a third-party service, suspects that more than half of the president's followers are fake or automated. During the election, automated bots comprised up to 18 percent of Twitter traffic and disproportionately favored Trump. Nearly 33 percent of pro-Trump tweets were believed to be bot-driven, and what's more disturbing, many of these bots had Russian origins.
Lastly, unlike the old days when we had three TV network newscasts and a hometown newspaper providing mainstream news, today there are partisan cable channels and myriad websites purporting to provide the latest on current affairs. These are visited primarily by people who ascribe to a site's particular political slant, thus reinforcing our fractured electorate.
Don't get me wrong. I think the internet is one of the greatest innovations in human history. However, it has brought unfortunate consequences to our politics that few could have imagined 17 years ago, let alone when our nation was founded. Politics has always been messy, but sometimes we may be better off with the devil we know than the devils we don't.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
