Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age

by Martin Moore

Overview

In the space of one election cycle, authoritarian governments, moneyed elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes, and turn social networks into battlefields. Facebook, Google and Twitter – where our politics now takes place – have lost control and are struggling to claw it back.

Prepare for a new strain of democracy. A world of datafied citizens, real-time surveillance, enforced wellness and pre-crime. Where switching your mobile platform will have more impact on your life than switching your government. Where freedom and privacy are seen as incompatible with social wellbeing and compulsory transparency.

As our lives migrate online, we have become increasingly vulnerable to digital platforms founded on selling your attention to the highest bidder. Our laws don’t cover what is happening and our politicians don’t understand it. But if we don’t change the system now, we may not get another chance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786074089
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	10/23/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Martin Moore is director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, and a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He was previously founding director of the Media Standards Trust (2006–2015) where he won a Knight News Challenge award and a Prospect Think Tank award. He writes extensively on the news media and public policy and lives on a farm in Oxfordshire.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part 1 Hackers

1 Individuals: the Freextremist Model 3

2 Plutocrats: the Mercer Model 37

3 States: the Russia Model 72

Part 2 Systems Failure

4 The Facebook Elections 107

5 Anarchy in the Googlesphere 136

6 The Unbearable Lightness of Twitter 166

Part 3 Alternative Futures

7 Platform Democracy 195

8 Surveillance Democracy 222

9 Democracy Rehacked 246

Acknowledgements 273

Notes 275

Index 311

What People are Saying About This

author of How Democracy Ends David Runciman

‘Enormously wide-ranging and deeply researched, this is the definitive account of how digital technology has changed the entire political landscape, with profound consequences for democracy. From Brexit to Trump, and from Estonia to the Philippines, Martin Moore uncovers the real stories behind the fake ones. You’ll discover that the truth is often stranger than fiction and that the future is more open than you think.’

author of Breaking News Alan Rusbridger

‘The world is belatedly waking up to some frightening realities about the intersection of digital technologies and the health of democracies. Martin Moore’s book is asharpwake-up call – ambitious in its sweep and urgent in its importantmessage.’

author of The People Vs Tech and The Dark Net Jamie Bartlett

‘Democracy Hacked gets beyond the headlines – a compelling, informed and highly readable account of how democracy is being disrupted by the tech revolution, and what can be done to get us back on track. One of the best expositions I’ve read yet of what is the biggest political challenge of our generation.’

Editorial Reviews

09/17/2018
Web tracking and social media threaten democracy with both anarchic populism and dour authoritarianism, according to this scattershot study of politics and technology. Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communications and Power at King’s College London, spotlights three agents that “poison the democratic well” in 2016: the denizens of the online forum 4chan, incubator of right-wing memes; the plutocrats who fund the news site Breitbart, promulgator of right-wing ideology; and the Russian government, producer of bot-driven pro-Trump fake news and Twitter commentary. Moore provides a lucid rundown of what he sees as the key enabler of this propaganda: the relentless data collection and customer profiling operations of tech giants including Google and Facebook, which permit the microtargeting of manipulative political messages. Speculating on where these capabilities are headed, he forecasts a total surveillance society under the soft dictatorship of corporations or hard dictatorship of government inquisitors. Moore’s argument that digital technology empowers both Big Brother and 4chan’s antiestablishment “freextremists” isn’t very coherent, and his anxious portrait of a hacked democracy of “smear stories about opposition candidates... vehement partisanship... singularly one-sided information” sounds a lot like the democratic electioneering the West has known for centuries. Moore’s alarmist brief fails to make a strong case that politics on the internet are uniquely poisonous or even unusual. Agent: Annabel Merullo, Peters Fraser and Dunlop (U.K.). (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Democracy Hacked gets beyond the headlines – a compelling, informed and highly readable account of how democracy is being disrupted by the tech revolution, and what can be done to get us back on track. One of the best expositions I’ve read yet of what is the biggest political challenge of our generation.’

Jamie Bartlett

‘Excellent.’

New Statesman

‘Eye-opening... An important, timely, and clearly written look at a crucial subject.’

Booklist

‘The world is belatedly waking up to some frightening realities about the intersection of digital technologies and the health of democracies. Martin Moore’s book is a sharp wake-up call – ambitious in its sweep and urgent in its important message.’

Alan Rusbridger

‘Enormously wide-ranging and deeply researched, this is the definitive account of how digital technology has changed the entire political landscape, with profound consequences for democracy. From Brexit to Trump, and from Estonia to the Philippines, Martin Moore uncovers the real stories behind the fake ones. You’ll discover that the truth is often stranger than fiction and that the future is more open than you think.’

David Runciman

2018-09-03

A new book about the burgeoning phenomenon of election hacking, a problem that is far more complex than many people realize.

Technology journalist Moore, the director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, begins with an overview of the internet's genesis as a utopian frontier pioneered by 1960s counterculture visionaries. Chronicling the later development of Google, Facebook, and other social media, he examines how they transmogrified from innocent, beneficial elements of the cyberworld into revenue-driven tools of blatant capitalism. Starting with Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, Moore details the development of the internet's role in political campaigns. It has morphed from a place to organize and canvass into a cynical and chaotic battlefield of "memetic warfare," smear campaigns, and electoral discord. Sorting through the evolution of online forum 4chan and its offspring, the author examines how Steve Bannon and Breitbart News co-opted the once-apolitical resident hackers and trollers of these "meme factories," spinning them into an army of guerrillas bent on sabotaging the 2016 presidential campaign. "[They] hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, doxxed journalists, harassed critics, gamed social media and baited mainstream media," writes Moore. "They used digital tools and platforms to do to politics what Silicon Valley had already done to the economy and society, to cause disruption." In what's been dubbed "surveillance capitalism," the author shows the staggering degree to which Google and Facebook now gather both consumer and personal data as commodities to increase stock value. Moore demonstrates how these data have affected elections across the world, in the Philippines, Turkey, India, Iran, Britain, and beyond. The author also tackles Vladimir Putin's global "covert army" now sewing discord and undermining democratic processes, the nuanced involvement of Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms, and much more.

Less about solutions and more about the degree and details of the crisis, this volume on the digital disintegration of democratic processes is at once engrossing, instructive, and urgently necessary.

Kirkus Reviews

‘Eye-opening… An important, timely, and clearly written look at a crucial subject.’

Booklist