Digital Media For a Stronger Democracy: How Social Media Has Forced Increased Accountability From The Political Class?

Agam Chaudhary, CMO, Digitalabs-Digital Wing of Laqshya Media Group, explains the power of social media where anyone could generate their own news feed in real-time, thus, loosening the grasp of the politically controlled media over information dissemination. He also talks about how social media has empowered the people of today and directed the burden of showcasing action on the political class.

Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong is in a tough spot. The country has been experiencing unprecedented protests that traditional methods of suppression have failed to work on. The police have tried violence, there seem to have been incidents of state-sponsored extra-judicial brutal violence, there have been arrests, and tries of appeasement. But seemingly nothing has been able to stem the upsurge of protestors. What’s driving them?

A 15 year old girl in Sweden decides that she’s had enough with the inaction regarding climate change. Greta Thunberg decided to protest outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018 and on March 15, 2019, 1.4 million students in 112 countries joined Greta in protesting against inaction in the face of climate change. What helped the actions of a single teenager snowball into a worldwide movement comprising of millions within 7 months?

The brutal gang rape and murder of a 23 year old physiotherapy intern in Delhi, circa 2012 brought the National Capital of India to a standstill. Protests rocked the city, even reaching to the walled compounds of the power centres of the country. Attempts by political parties to join in the protests were openly derided by the protestors, indicating a lack of intervention by well organised outfits. What then enabled the mass outpouring that resulted in desperate shutting down of access and probably kickstarted the demise of the ruling dispensation?

What allowed for movements like the Arab spring in largely autocratic countries?

What allowed for Occupy Wall Street? For Black Lives Matter?

What makes countries that rank low on the democratic index go to elaborate lengths so to stop access to helpful technologies even?

The power of Social Media

A true democracy means the rule of people. However, with passing time the rule of people turned into the rule over people. A major tool in that conversion was a hold over the narrative by the powers that be. The institutes of media dissemination were either controlled by the states, or after liberalisation of media, were staffed by people who were largely subservient, subservience achieved through various means. 

What information reached the masses was tightly controlled by the ruling classes, and the former had no option but to believe what they were being told. For there existed no alternate information.

However, with the advent of social media, the grasp of the controlled media over information dissemination slipped faster than these monoliths could respond to. 

Now anyone could generate their own news feed in real-time, and if the issues echoed with the audience, it could be catapulted into not just national, but international prominence within hours, or even minutes.

Anyone with a camera phone and an internet connection could ask hard-hitting questions combined with visual proof and get heard by the relevant authorities if the issue threatened to shift public opinion about the latter.

Let’s forget governments, the power of social media as such, that huge corporations could be brought to their knees by a single tweet or status update that displayed a serious deviation in product or service and achieved the multiplier effect.

The gatekeepers of information died and had to reinvent themselves as proponents of Social Media as a source of information to keep themselves relevant. The ministers and ministries set up Social Media accounts to put forth their narrative and to interact with those who had relevant questions. Nearly all corporations set up Social Media as the core constituency of their CRM strategies. A few of the most respected and loved leaders both from the political and the corporate classed e.g. Ms. Sushma Swaraj and Mr. Anand Mahindra spent / spend considerable time listening to, interacting with and sorting out the grievances of the common man.

The current ruling dispensation in our country has been extremely intelligent in this regard. The PM Narendra Modi has 48.9 million followers vs. his primary opponent who has about 10.2 million. In fact, a lot of ministries such as Ministry of HRD, the ministry of railways and the ministry of finance (to speak of the big ones) set up their twitter accounts once the ruling BJP stormed into power in 2014. 

And why wouldn’t they? India’s internet user-base recently crossed the 500 million thresholds. Anyone who thought that the voice of the internet comes mostly from the urban areas would do well to know that more than 40% of the active users (pegged at 493 million), come from rural India. So much so, that rural India has become the growth driver for digital access.

With such a large chunk of the population even in a developing nation having access to and consuming information through social media (326.1 million), you can well imagine that any smart government would like to have this massive constituency covered and more importantly, well attended to.

The power of Social Media is such that even the most powerful man on the earth prefers to interact with his followers through social rather than traditional media. One might have severe disagreements with his ideas and policies but will have to concede that President Donald J. Trump has used the distrust for traditional media as a highly effective tool and scores far higher on authenticity than almost any other political leader. 

There can be no stronger argument for “Digital Media for a stronger democracy: How social media has forced increased accountability from the political class” than leaders from the most democratic nations looking at leveraging direct conversations with their constituents to garner support, while the world’s least democratic nations look at ways of banning platforms of such open discourse.

There have been efforts to weaponize Social Media for supporting divisive agendas and pushing racist narratives. However, nowhere did we mention that Social Media stands exclusively for the amplification of good. it stands for the amplification of whatever the real issues are. And if racism, religious divisiveness and mindless consumption rule the roost against unity, harmony, and mindfulness at any point in time, it’s time to go at the causes, not the symptoms, as they are highlighted online.

For good or at times, for bad, Social Media has empowered the man on the street and pointed the burden of showcasing action on the political / ruling class. Hopefully, we will be intelligent enough to use this tool for good, or we’ll be giving the ruling classes excuse enough to regulate it. And we all know whose benefit most regulations have worked for!