Social media isn’t just for photos of kittens and your uncle’s political memes anymore. It’s increasingly a tool governments use to influence elections and subvert democracy, according to a new report by the democracy advocacy group Freedom House.
The report found that at least 18 countries, including the United States, had their elections manipulated through social media over the last year. The spread of disinformation also contributed to the overall decline of Internet freedom across the world for the seventh year running, and contributed to violent attacks on human-rights activists and journalists, according to the report.
Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote is by now well-documented, but the Freedom House report found that it wasn’t just foreign forces that were trying to sway elections. Turkey, Venezuela, the Philippines, and more than two dozen other countries employed “opinion shapers” that spread government talking points and shut down critics within their own borders. The number of countries trying to shape online discussions in this way has risen every year since Freedom House began tracking it in 2009 (the image above is Freedom House’s graphic of global Internet freedom for this year).
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
