Uncomfortable takes: social media interference in politics just Got Real

Remember the Cambridge Analytica Scandal? If you don’t please google that right now, but if you do, I bet you your memory runs somethign like this “a secretive analytics company stole people’s data and used it and some very complex algorithm to mess with political outcomes in the US”. I was a big “fan” of the scandal, because it was the time of some righteous posturing from traditional media and some amusing misunderstanding of how the Internet works and how much we have NO idea how to regulate big platforms.

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal was one where a few people got indicted for doing some illegal things but most of them had little to do with the glaring, unspoken accusation “you persuaded millions of people, using complex technological algorithms and you got the wrong person elected”. The only massively tangible consequence was legislators asked platforms to put in controls for things they Feared might happen but could not Show had happened and a slew of legislation was produced which may or may not impact how people use platforms for politics moving fwd. Nobody lost their seat among the politicians who got elected, one person seems to have gone to prison for “obstruction of justice” of all things, a few people got famous for a while and probably got a few lucrative gigs as consultants.

Until today.

Fast forward to 2024 and a small Eastern European country and “shit just got real” because whatever did not happen in the US in 2018–2019 is happening now in Romania. Romania held elections in December this year and a largely unknown candidate came through to the second round. The statement “largely unknown” is problematic to myself and a lot of my friends who said he was unknown, because patently you cannot be unknown and win an election in a country with 19 mil inhabitants. So, what happened? Well, as you may expect because of the intro, people say what happened was social media (TikTok this time) and Russia and lots of smart usage of money and algorithms. Except that this time, THE ELECTIONS GOT INVALIDATED.

Yeah, you read that right. 2 weeks after the first round and before the 2nd round which was going to see the “largely unknown” candidate and a second runner-up face off for the presidency, the Electoral Commission has invalidated the 1st round elections following disclosure of documents by the National Defense Supreme Council. What do the documents say? That a network of technologists with deep tentacles into TikTok communities have moved in excess of 1 mil euros through social media to get the Unknown Candidate elected.

A few things which are interesting about this from a cyberpsychology POV:

• This guy was not on TV, he had not held any significant office; he is, by all accounts, a product of TikTok, YouTube and blogs. What does this mean for how we understand media and the impact it has on public consciousness? Because this is a massive case study in how much traditional media and social media are now one and the same for millions of people
• Does the thing that Cambridge Analytica did actually work? Because at the time, the one thing we could not agree on was that their tactics, all of that complex targeting and messaging, actually did anything.
• How do platforms govern what is true and what is not true? Because in this case, whether we like it or not, millions of people heard what this guy had to say and decided that it was true for them, and I don’t mean political or economic policy, I mean things like curing cancer with alkaline “forces” and the “good sides” of hyper-nationalist and fascism.

I am sat here having my mind blown over and over again by this story. If you want to read more about this and don’t speak Romanian, try Google translate and go to this site here https://snoop.ro/

[mind blown].