As internet platforms disrupt housing markets, labour markets, transportation systems and our media landscape, they’re also fuelling the current “trucker” occupation in Ottawa.
Since the Cambridge Analytica voting scandal, we know how internet platforms can shape the direction of our fragile democracies. When we look at how the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was planned and organized by far-right groups on social media platforms, what have we learned?
In Ottawa, we see how the entire protest is mediated through huge U.S.-based internet platforms, who act globally and, most importantly, escape regulation in most if not all jurisdictions they operate.
While we wrangle about how to deal with the fallout, these companies use their enormous economic power to lobby our governments to give them more space online to experiment, disrupt and profit. Ottawa provides a sober moment to reconsider our attitude toward these disrupters.
Rather than talking about GoFundMe, Facebook, Twitter or Telegram in isolation, we should start thinking about how our entire political landscape is being remade through companies that harvest our data (through likes and shares), create echo chambers and favour self-regulation over state regulation.
From the formation of political identities and grievances to the activation and mobilization of political support, to the logistical planning, to the financing and communication, every step along the road to the occupation in Ottawa has been paved and mediated by internet-based platforms.
Today, political insurrections across borders can be crowdsourced online. What was once the domain of the CIA and other intelligence-gathering operations to overthrow governments, has become “democratized.” In the case of Ottawa, you have fringe right-wing groups and Trump activists in the U.S. providing financial support to the Ottawa protests under the mantle of “freedom.”
The post-truth era relies on social media to spread misinformation. With Ottawa, we’ve seen fake posts of empty grocery shelves promoted by Conservative Party MPs using stock images of UK supermarket shelves. Other posts on social media platforms have falsely suggested that 50,000 truckers are assembling in Ottawa. The truth lies somewhere in between the lines, yet the lines become increasingly blurry, and the noise overwhelms even the most careful observers of the news.
Can we imagine this event unfolding in the 1990s? Spreading misinformation to shape political identities would have been a lot more difficult, a lot slower and the domain of state terrorism. Today, we must spend a lot of time and energy debunking fake news and conspiracy theories before getting to the point where one can address real grievances.
The speed and scale with which the political landscape changes today places enormous pressure on all of us to ensure that we don’t drift into situations that become ungovernable – and to be exploited by far-right extremists.
Thorben Wieditz is an urban geographer and planner whose work focuses on the intersection of cities and app-based platforms in the housing, labour and transportation sectors.
