My husband, young daughter, and I were in Myanmar to witness what many thought would be a remarkable transformation. It was 2011 and Myanmar’s military junta, which had ruled the country with a heavy hand for decades, had just agreed to transition to civilian rule. The ruling generals would allow elections to be held and they agreed to free the famed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. If all went well, life would change dramatically in this beautiful country and it would become more free, more prosperous, and more benevolent to its citizens.
But we were also full of trepidation, driven by an uneasy feeling that Myanmar could just as easily be on the verge of political upheaval. If real elections were held, and Aung San Suu Kyi became the equivalent of prime minister, Myanmar would likely become an anocracy fairly quickly. The military would be the biggest losers in the transition, relinquishing dictatorial control and unrestrained access to the state’s coffers. I also worried about the rise of factions, especially a Buddhist faction. Myanmar (formerly called Burma) had a history of ethnic conflict, especially between its majority Buddhist population and its Muslim minority. The fraught relationship dated back to the British occupation of the country, which lasted from 1826 to 1948. During this time, Indian and Muslim skilled workers immigrated to Burma to work for British-controlled industries. Many Buddhist natives—Myanmar’s sons of the soil—felt marginalized, particularly in regions that absorbed many immigrants. The Buddhists were left out of the new industrial economy and relegated to lower-paying agricultural work. In the 1930s, radical Buddhist nationalists started campaigning against Muslims and calling for a “Burma for the Burmans.” Ever since then, Indian Muslims and the Rohingya people—Muslims from the Arakan region—had been continuously discriminated against, demoted from citizenship, denied legal representation, and forced into labor camps. When rebel groups tried to resist, the government used the struggles and protests to justify crackdowns. An opening up of the political system to competition could create even more incentives for Buddhists to flex their political muscle and exploit this divide.
A year after our visit, however, there was reason to be optimistic about Myanmar’s democracy. The government agreed to a cease-fire with separatist rebels from the Karen ethnic group, it released hundreds of political prisoners, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won parliamentary elections in a landslide. Even the country’s censorship laws were loosening.
During our trip, the only internet access I’d been able to find was on a computer in the old British colonial hotel in dusty downtown Yangon. Most of the time the connection failed. When I showed people my iPhone, their faces went blank; they had no idea what it was. But in 2011, the new government significantly reduced internet restrictions. Soon, Facebook launched in the country. By 2015, when Aung San Suu Kyi was set to be named state counsellor, Myanmar had gone from a country in which only 1 percent of its citizens had internet access—the lowest in the world except for North Korea—to one where 22 percent did. It seemed like an enormous leap forward.
Instead it was a disaster in the making. In 2012, a group of Buddhist ultranationalists, many of them monks, took to Facebook to target Muslim populations throughout Myanmar. They blamed them for local violence, and described them as invaders of the region and a threat to the Buddhist majority. The posts, which went viral, included comments like “Just feed them to the pigs.” Group pages proposed massive rallies demanding that the Rohingya be deported from the country. The tech giant quickly became the country’s most popular social media platform—and the primary source of digital news. Before long, Myanmar’s military leaders were using it to post hate speech and false news stories; fear served to buttress their influence and power at a time when they otherwise might have lost it. Government leaders, not wanting to antagonize the military, supported these stories, with officials creating thousands of fake accounts that spread disinformation, blaming the “Bengalis”—as they called the Rohingya, whom they considered illegal immigrants—for violence and crimes.
Violence first broke out in the Rakhine state between Buddhists and Muslims in June 2012 when eighty thousand Muslims were reported “displaced.” Less than a year later, the world began to hear reports of ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Rohingya. The initial violence appeared to be perpetrated by local mobs of Buddhists, as government security forces stood by and watched. Rakhine men (Buddhists) used Molotov cocktails, machetes, and homemade weapons to attack villages throughout the region. Sometimes the soldiers joined in. Though it seemed evident that the violence was being stoked by the falsehoods circulating on Facebook, the government refused to acknowledge that the Rohingya Muslims even existed. Journalists who reported on ethnic cleansing and military crimes were imprisoned. Others who tried to get Facebook to intervene were stonewalled. In 2013, Aela Callan, an Australian documentary film student at Stanford who had captured the violence on-screen, reached out to Elliot Schrage, the vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook. She presented her project revealing the connection between hate speech and the Rohingya genocide, but Facebook turned a blind eye. A year later, a Norwegian phone company named Telenor entered the market in Myanmar, letting its cellphone purchasers use Facebook without paying any data charges, massively increasing the platform’s reach.
In the years that followed, dozens of journalists, companies, human rights organizations, foreign governments, and even citizens of Myanmar continued to alert Facebook to the unchecked spread of hate speech and misinformation on the platform. But Facebook remained silent, refusing to acknowledge the problem. Violence began to escalate in October 2016 when the military intensified its campaign against the Rohingya, murdering, raping, and arresting them, and even burning their homes. By December 2016, hundreds had been killed and thousands more had fled. But the real genocide began in August 2017, when the Myanmar military, along with Buddhist mobs, began mass killings, deportations, and rapes. By January 2018, an estimated 24,000 Rohingya people had been killed, with an additional 18,000 Rohingya women and children raped or sexually assaulted. Another 116,000 were beaten, 36,000 were thrown into fires, and approximately 700,000 of the nearly one million estimated Rohingya had been forced to flee. It was the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War.
The world looked to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who had championed democracy, for a response. But she did not acknowledge the violence, claiming instead that photos of Rohingya fleeing western Myanmar were fake. On Facebook, she wrote, “We know very well, more than most, what it means to be deprived of human rights and democratic protection.” All the people in Myanmar, she insisted (on a phone call to Turkish president Erdoğan), were entitled to protection. The Rohingya situation, she continued, was the result of “a huge iceberg of misinformation” rather than anything real.
the world has seen more countries move down the democratic ladder than up it. This backsliding has occurred not just in places where democracy is new, but also in wealthy, liberal countries whose longtime democracies were once considered sacrosanct. Some elected leaders have attacked free speech and remade their constitutions to concentrate power in their own hands. Others have attempted to undercut representative elections. All have tried to convince their citizens of the need for more autocratic measures. V-Dem, the Swedish research institute, collects detailed data on the different types of democracies around the world and then rates them on a 100-point scale with 100 being the most democratic and 0 being the least. According to the institute, Spain has suffered one of the worst declines in Western Europe, followed by Greece, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Austria. Nordic countries, the most liberal in the world, have also dropped since 2010: Denmark, the number one ranked democracy for most of the past hundred years, has been downgraded 10 points on V-Dem’s scale; Sweden has been downgraded 35. The swift rate of democratic decay around the world has been so rapid that V-Dem issued its first “Autocratization Alert” in 2020.
For a while, at least, the one glaring exception to this trend was Africa. Over much of the past decade, sub-Saharan Africa was the only part of the globe where democracy continued to expand rather than contract. Burkina Faso experienced its first-ever democratic transition in 2015 after twenty-seven years of uninterrupted semi-authoritarian rule. Sierra Leone transitioned to democracy in 2018 when the ruling party stepped down after being defeated by the opposition. The Ivory Coast held its first postcolonial internationally supervised and most inclusive election in 2015. And after two decades of military rule, Gambia transitioned to democracy in 2017.
Africa was an outlier in another way, too: Over this same period, its countries experienced the least amount of internet penetration anywhere in the world. North Korea had the very lowest in 2016, but the next twelve countries—including Eritrea, Somalia, Niger, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—were all in Africa. Access to the internet began to increase in Africa in 2014, when social media became a primary means of communication. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter made inroads in sub-Saharan Africa starting in 2015, and as they did, the level of conflict began to rise. In Ethiopia, for example, longstanding tensions between Tigrayans and Oromos began to boil over in 2019 when a series of fake videos claimed local officials were arming young men. The conflict had been escalating since 2018 as Ethiopia transitioned to a new democratically elected government. According to one analyst, this coincided with “a rapid increase in access to the internet, where Facebook dominates.” And hate speech promoted on social media in the Central African Republic has recently been stoking divisions between Muslims and Christians there. In 2019, the democracy ratings on V-Dem for sub-Saharan Africa began to decline like everywhere else in the world.
It’s not likely to be a coincidence that the global shift away from democracy has tracked so closely with the advent of the internet, the introduction of smart phones, and the widespread use of social media. The radically new information environment in which we live is perhaps the single biggest cultural and technological change the world has seen in this century. Facebook was initially hailed as a great tool of democratization. It would connect people, encourage the free exchange of ideas and opinions, and allow news to be curated by citizens themselves rather than major news outlets. It seemed like the perfect tool to put power in the hands of the people. Dissidents had a new way to organize and communicate, which promised to usher in a new era of freedom and reform. Facebook became the world’s most popular platform in 2009. By 2010, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all popular and growing. By 2013, 23 percent of Americans received at least some of their news from social media. By 2016, over 62 percent of Americans did. Today it’s over 70 percent.
But social media platforms have proven to be a Pandora’s box. The age of information sharing has opened up unmitigated, unregulated pathways to the spread of misinformation (which is erroneous) or disinformation (which is intentionally misleading). Charlatans, conspiracy theorists, trolls, demagogues, and anti-democratic agents who had previously been shut out of the media environment—or at least had great difficulty gaining a mass audience—suddenly gained traction. According to Kate Starbird, a cofounder of the Center for an Informed Public and professor at the University of Washington, “The problem of misinformation was relatively very small back in 2009, and in fact, we talked about it: ‘Oh, don’t worry too much about it. Most of the information we see is true and from people who are well-meaning.’ ” But within five years, the amount of false information on social media platforms had skyrocketed. As social media penetrated countries and gained a larger share of people’s attention, a clear pattern emerged: ethnic factions grew, social divisions widened, resentment at immigrants increased, bullying populists got elected, and violence began to increase. Open, unregulated social media platforms turned out to be the perfect accelerant for the conditions that lead to civil war.
The problem is social media’s business model. To make money, technology companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter need to keep people on their platforms—or as they call it, “engaged”—for as long as possible. The longer users remain online—clicking on links about kittens, retweeting stories about celebrities, or sharing videos—the more advertising revenue the companies receive. Longer engagement also allows companies to gather more behavioral data about their users, which makes it easier to target ads, which brings in even more money. In 2009, Facebook introduced the “like” button, a feature that told the company which posts were most popular with its users. That same year—the year before democracies started to decline—Facebook introduced a second innovation: an algorithm that used a person’s previous likes to determine the posts they would see. Google, which owns YouTube, soon followed.
It turns out that what people like the most is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy. People are far more apt to like posts that are incendiary than those that are not, creating an incentive for people to post provocative material in the hopes that it will go viral. With the introduction of the like button, individual Facebook users were suddenly being rewarded for posting outrageous, angry content whether it was true or not. Studies have since shown that information that keeps people engaged is exactly the type of information that leads them toward anger, resentment, and violence. When William J. Brady and his colleagues at NYU analyzed half a million tweets, they found that each moral or emotional word used led to a 20 percent increase in retweets. Another study by the Pew Research Center showed that posts exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received nearly twice as many likes and shares as other types of content. And Tristan Harris, an American computer scientist and a former ethicist at Google, explained the incentives in a 2019 interview with The New York Times: “If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”
Worse, the behavioral algorithms began creating self-reinforcing, increasingly outlandish information silos that led users down dangerous paths: toward conspiracy theories, half-truths, and extremists seeking radical change. These recommendation engines, as they are called, ensured that users were channeled toward more narrow and more extreme information. If a user “liked” a post on a police officer helping a kitten, say, Facebook would funnel additional posts to the user on police benevolent associations, then pro-police stories, then increasingly more fanatical material. Walter Quattrociocchi, a computer scientist at Sapienza Università di Roma, analyzed fifty-four million comments over four years in different Facebook groups. He found that the longer a discussion continued, the more extreme the comments became. One study found that YouTube viewers who consume the kind of “mild” right-wing content created by provocative talk show host Joe Rogan, whose audience in 2020 was 286 million, are often pulled into much more radical alt-right content. The study concluded that YouTube is “a radicalization pipeline.”
It’s this business model of engagement that makes social media so terrifying to those of us who study civil wars. The current model doesn’t care if the information it disseminates is true or not, just that it is all-absorbing. And the big technology companies—who are now the new gatekeepers of news and information—have no incentive to restrict who uses their platforms or what they say. In fact, it is in the interest of their shareholders to disseminate engaging information as widely as possible.
If you are an extremist and you want to proselytize, social media is the perfect tool. This was certainly the case in Myanmar, where extremists like radical Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu found an eager audience for his anti-Rohingya views. After being imprisoned for his extreme views during the military’s rule, Wirathu emerged after 2013 as a radical cult figure, gaining thousands of followers inside and outside religious communities. Wirathu traveled around the country “preaching” against the Muslim problem in Myanmar and calling for greater military intervention. (In 2019, the government charged him with sedition because he claimed that Aung San Suu Kyi was not being harsh enough with the Muslim “invaders.”)
In 2018, Facebook finally admitted that it had contributed to community violence in Myanmar after a series of high-profile reports and stories directly connected the platform to the 2017 genocide. CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to do everything in the company’s power to stop the flow of hate speech and misinformation. The company hired three Burmese-speaking representatives, who ultimately removed 484 pages, 157 accounts, and 17 groups. Most activists and human rights groups felt this was grossly inadequate.
It was also too late to stem the tide. Military leaders who were blocked from Facebook turned to Twitter, where anti-Islamic and anti-Rohingya tweets had begun to proliferate. In one of the hundreds of new Twitter accounts discovered by Reuters in the summer of 2017, one person expressed a common sentiment: “There is no Rohingya in Myanmar, they are only illegal immigrants and terrorists.” But Twitter also declined to take down most of the posts. The consensus today is that none of the social media platforms did nearly enough to address how their platforms were being used to eradicate a minority group in this small southeast Asian country.
The Myanmar military’s violent campaign against the Rohingya was not a civil war. The Rohingya were not able to organize or fight back. This was a one-sided attack by the government and by Buddhist citizens against a minority group. It was a form of ethnic cleansing; an extreme example of the kind of conflict happening all over the world, aided by the megaphone that ethnic entrepreneurs have been given on social media to incite fear and violence. By the spring of 2018, Facebook’s dominance over Myanmar’s national conversation was so complete that when President Htin Kyaw resigned from his post, he chose to make his announcement not on television or radio, but on Facebook.
Sadly, civil war might be coming to Myanmar, nonetheless. Several months after Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won an overwhelming victory in the November 2020 elections, the military staged a coup—claiming election fraud—ousting her and other opposition leaders. Protesters and police clashed in the streets in the spring of 2021, the two sides inflamed by years of division that was sown in large part by social media. The military quickly began to crack down on peaceful protesters, shooting civilians in the street, beating and throwing protesters in jail, and grabbing suspected leaders from their homes at night. Even though Facebook barred Myanmar’s military from its platform and also blocked advertisements from military-owned businesses, the generals’ personal pages channeled copious amounts of propaganda to rationalize the coup and rally low-ranking officials.
The last weekend of March 2021 was the bloodiest to date. One of the local leaders of the protest, Soe Naing Win (an alias), who lives on the outskirts of the city of Yangon, cried when interviewed by an American journalist. Nonviolent protest wasn’t working, he told the reporter. “If diplomacy fails, if the killings continue, the people of Myanmar will be forced to defend themselves.” Soe Naing Win revealed that he had already begun training to fight. Civil war, he said, was going to happen.
a nobody—the mayor of a city in Mindanao known as “the fruit basket of the Philippines”—when he decided to run for president in 2015. He had little money and little political support. But he knew enough to hire Nic Gabunada, a marketing consultant, to build a social media army that might help get him elected. Gabunada allegedly paid hundreds of social media influencers to praise Duterte and criticize his opponents, then popularize hashtags to draw attention to these posts.
Duterte used the platforms to exploit and amplify discontent with the Philippine government. He criticized the media as an arm of the political elite, questioned institutions, and painted the political establishment as corrupt. He stoked citizen fears of drugs proliferating, and made the case for a police crackdown to restore order. Facebook was essential to Duterte’s win in 2016: Over 97 percent of Filipinos who are online are on the platform, leading Bloomberg journalist Lauren Etter to describe the Philippines as “prime Facebook country.”
At the start of Duterte’s campaign, Duterte was the only candidate to attend a forum for college voters organized by Maria Ressa, a renowned Filipino journalist and founder of Rappler, the Philippines’ largest online news source. Immediately, Duterte focused on reaching out to young people via their primary platform: Facebook. He reimagined his campaign, amplifying people who spread fake news and rumors about his opponents.
The strategy worked. Duterte won the majority of votes in greater Manila, the Cebuano-speaking regions in the south, and Mindanao—home of the long-aggrieved Moros. Exit polls showed that he had gained the support of young, well-educated voters who were tired of both the status quo and the corrupt political elite. Even though his campaign budget was much smaller than his opponents’, Duterte became the sixteenth president of the Philippines in 2016.
It’s become a pattern: social media as the vehicle that launches outsiders with autocratic impulses to power, riding a popular wave of support. We’ve seen it with Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India. It also potentially helped bring Mariano Rajoy of Spain to power. All were social media savvy dark horse candidates. Rajoy won a surprise victory in Spain in 2016 after carefully targeting Facebook users who had previously voted for his opponent. Social media offers these candidates not only an unregulated environment but also multiple platforms from which to disseminate information and propaganda (candidates can reach different audiences on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook). In the past, if a politician wanted to influence voters, they had to go through gatekeepers: party leaders and major networks and newspapers. Social media has allowed any candidate and any party—no matter how fringe—to circumvent these controls.
But it’s not just about exposure. The algorithms of social media mean that these outsiders can capitalize on the best drivers of engagement—fear and outrage—to disseminate lies about their opponents and a country’s institutions to a mass audience. According to a 2017 report by Freedom House, disinformation campaigns influenced elections in at least seventeen countries that year. Sudan’s government created an internal unit within its National Intelligence and Security Service that employed “cyber-jihadists” who created fake accounts that then infiltrated popular groups on Facebook and WhatsApp. They then wrote favorably about government policies while denouncing any journalist critical of the regime. As the report documented: “Government agents in Venezuela regularly used manipulated footage to disseminate lies about opposition protesters on social media, creating confusion and undermining the credibility of the opposition movement ahead of elections. In Kenya, users readily shared fake news articles and videos bearing the logos of generally trusted outlets such as CNN, the BBC, and NTV Kenya on social media and messaging apps in advance of the August 2017 election.”
This isn’t the first time in modern history that populists with anti-democratic leanings have come to power. It is also not the first time that democracies have experienced backsliding. What’s different is the mechanism: Before, autocracy came about when military generals launched coups. But now it’s being ushered in by the voters themselves.
This is happening in large part because social media allows candidates to sow, or capitalize on, doubts that citizens might have about democracy as a form of government. Disinformation campaigns can be used to attack institutions, undermining people’s trust in representative government, a free press, and an independent judiciary, reducing tolerance and support for pluralism. They can be used to stoke fear, which helps get far-right, law-and-order candidates elected. Finally, they can cause citizens to question the results of an election, claiming fraud and convincing at least some voters that the election has been stolen. To make good decisions about candidates in democracies, voters must have good information, and social media has flooded voters with bad information. As people lose faith in the democratic process, they are more apt to support an alternative system—and to willingly place power in the hands of the charismatic individuals who promise protection and a certain future.
This is what Duterte did when he broke almost every democratic norm in the country. It’s also what Bolsonaro has done in Brazil. Like Duterte, no one thought Bolsonaro had a chance to win the presidency; a poll of Brazilian voters in 2014 by Fadi Quran (an activist and campaign director) found that 66 percent of them had no intention of voting for him. He was perceived as too right-wing and too inexperienced. But Bolsonaro used what little money he had to place ads on Facebook and YouTube—the first Brazilian candidate to campaign via social media. His early YouTube videos and Facebook posts were brutal attacks against his opponents. He compared former president Dilma Rousseff to the Boston marathon bombers. He created a video where he claimed that Rousseff’s secretary of policies for women, Eleonora Menicucci, was (bizarrely) both a communist and a Nazi, and an embarrassment to the country. In some videos, he called for extreme forms of political torture, and in others for the return of a military dictatorship.
Slowly, the videos started gaining more likes, more views. At first, they simply peddled conspiracy theories, but over time, they began to feature the ideas of the global alt-right. Like other populist leaders, Bolsonaro positioned himself as an outsider who was fighting for the people of Brazil against a crooked political elite. As Bolsonaro faced greater scrutiny from traditional media, he relied more on social media to communicate directly with ordinary Brazilians, calling the old media corrupt and full of lies. Six months after he began his social media campaign, he won the presidency. Almost 90 percent of people who voted for Bolsonaro had read and believed these stories. Today, he continues to communicate frequently with supporters on WhatsApp and Twitter, often in ALL CAPS. For the past few years, Bolsonaro has hosted a weekly YouTube and Facebook Live session, streaming live videos for his over ten million followers.
One might think the move away from democracy would make these leaders unpopular, but by the time they consolidate power, they have successfully wielded their favorite means of communication—social media—to convince voters that anti-democratic measures are needed to preserve the country’s peace and their own prosperity. Duterte has hired hundreds of individuals, many from China (Duterte is an avid supporter) to create fake social media accounts, where they continue to harass critics and post messages that praise the president. It is estimated that of all Twitter accounts that mention Duterte, 20 percent are in fact bots. By October 2020, Duterte’s approval rating was 91 percent.
Something similar has happened in Hungary, where President Viktor Orbán has also become more popular over time, not less. In Europe, right-wing anti-immigrant parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Lega Nord in Italy, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the Front National in France, and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria have all seen their support increase in recent years. The way social media is structured is Darwinian—it is the survival of the fittest, where the most aggressive and most brazen voices drown out everyone else. And in the contest between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, social media is inadvertently helping the autocrats win.
just drive countries down the democratic ladder. It also heightens the ethnic, social, religious, and geographic divisions that can be the first step in the creation of factions. This is, of course, because myth, emotion, and the politics of grievance—all of which drive factionalism—make for incredibly engaging content. Social media algorithms encourage this divisive content. They segregate people by design, driving those whose values or opinions differ into ever-diverging realities, tearing societies apart.
Sweden, for example, is not known for far-right nationalist politics. In fact, it’s known for just the opposite: a progressive political culture and generous welfare system. Sweden’s population has always prided itself on what it sees as “Swedish Exceptionalism,” a dedication to community, equality, and mutual concern. Swedes actually have a name for it—folkhemmet, which means “the people’s home.”
But on September 9, 2014, a former neo-Nazi party became Sweden’s third largest party in parliament. The fact that Sweden, of all the Western democracies, had embraced a racist, xenophobic party was so surprising that Jo Becker, a New York Times journalist, decided to spend months investigating how it happened. The party, known as the Sweden Democrats, was founded in 1988 by a chemist who had joined the Waffen SS during World War II. In 2005, party leader Jimmie Akesson set out to reform the party’s image, swapping swastikas and combat boots for suits and ties and reorienting the group from Nazism toward populism. (Members are no longer allowed to wear Nazi uniforms to meetings.) But the party had a problem: Swedish newspapers, television stations, and radio shows refused to run their ads. The postal service often refused to deliver its mass mailings. The party wasn’t growing. Most citizens didn’t even know it existed.
The internet changed that. As Becker discovered, in 2009, Akesson, a former web designer, began to focus on building an online presence. He created multiple Facebook pages, which allowed him and other party leaders to communicate directly with their followers. They then created two news websites, Samhällsnytt (News in Society) and Nyheter Idag (News Today), where they published far-right stories related to daily events. Though much of the information—about immigrants, about the far left—was deliberately misleading, it quickly found an audience. Becker noted that, in 2018, the vast majority (85 percent) of election-related junk news in Sweden came from these two websites, plus a third called Fria Tider (Free Times). More than a million Swedes viewed these sites weekly—about the same number of readers as Sweden’s two largest newspapers. In 2010—a mere year after switching to an online campaign—the party gained seats in Sweden’s parliament for the first time. By 2014 it was the third-largest party in parliament. Nine years was all it took.
The Sweden Democrats insist that they are not neo-Nazis. Their leaders will tell you that they are normal working-class people who care about the social changes happening in Sweden. They certainly look respectable. Members of the party are striking for their clean-cut blazer-wearing appearance. But the language they espouse online tells a different story. This is an identity faction that sees its historical rights at stake, a faction that actively seeks to define itself in relation to a lesser “other” and exclude them from the folkhemmet. On its websites, you will find stories about Muslim immigrants committing crimes, Muslim immigrants brutalizing animals, and Muslim immigrants refusing to conform to Western laws. You will read that “foreign burglars were arrested following tips from an attentive neighbor,” accompanied by a clearly staged photograph. The party emphasizes the need to return Sweden to a simpler and happier time. The goal is to restore “the national home.”
Social media is every ethnic entrepreneur’s dream. Algorithms, by pushing outrageous material, allow these nationalist extremists to shape people’s toxic views of “the other”—an ideal means of demonizing and targeting racial minorities, and creating division. Ethnic entrepreneurs use it to craft a common narrative, a story that people can get behind, and they encourage followers to go down the rabbit hole. Swedish YouTubers like Vedad Odobasic, who goes by the name “Angry Foreigner” (he is white and originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina), creates videos that are radically anti-immigrant. One is called “Interviews: Victim of Multiculturalism.” Another is “Tourists Aren’t Safe in Sweden.” His videos have garnered more than thirty-three million total views. Another Swedish YouTuber, Lennart Matikainen, hosted a show on Swebbtv, a conservative YouTube and “news” platform that advocated far-right policies and conspiracy theories. YouTube took the platform down in 2020 for violating community guidelines. However, Matikainen’s own personal account has over six million views.
Over the last ten years, ethnic entrepreneurs have emerged and thrived in countries around the world, aided by social media. In India, Modi has used every page from the ethnic entrepreneur playbook to denigrate non-Hindus. He does this by communicating directly with his forty-seven-million-plus followers on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. (In March 2020, Modi had the third-highest number of Twitter followers of any politician in the world, after former president Barack Obama and then-president Donald Trump.) He frequently uses social media to communicate “Hindutva”—the movement to prioritize Hindu teachings in Indian culture. Modi has been helped in his efforts by lesser ethnic entrepreneurs who are just as media savvy. TV presenter Arnab Goswami has peddled misinformation and hate speech in support of Modi, while famous yogi Baba Ramdev has used his platform to inflame the Hindu nationalist base—and sell his Ayurvedic products.
In Brazil, YouTuber Nando Moura has embraced Bolsonaro-supporting conspiracy theories and paranoid far-right rants to grow his audience, which now numbers about three million people. In the United Kingdom, YouTuber and social media influencer Paul Joseph Watson, who has an audience of 1.88 million subscribers, has said that Islam glorifies sexual assault and accuses refugees of carrying “parasitic disease.”
If Milošević were alive today, he would adore social media, using it to celebrate the mythology of a greater Serbia on Twitter or Facebook. He would like fake videos of Albanians starting riots. He would share stories of Croats taking Serb jobs. He would retweet conspiracy theories about Bosnians abusing Serb children. He would hire a team of trolls to disseminate his calls for “unity” and spread disinformation about his opponents. And the algorithms of social media would reward him: with more followers, more likes, and perhaps even more money.
In the world’s democracies, where the principles of free speech and representative voice historically worked against demagoguery to promote healthy public discourse, the reach of today’s ethnic entrepreneurs is staggering. That they’ve been helped by social media is clear in a democracy like France, where the far-right political party known as the National Rally (formerly the French National Front Party), was once dismissed as a fringe movement, its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen a peddler of ugly rhetoric about immigrants and the supremacy of French culture. Now, under the leadership of Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, the party has spread its message—exploiting and inflaming racial tension—with the most sophisticated social media operation of any major political party in France. (Le Pen has fifteen permanent staffers who carry out research, craft memes, and coordinate the party’s attempts to discredit opponents on social media.) Despite losing the 2017 runoff election and being investigated for misuse of EU funds, by 2019, Le Pen had secured twenty-two seats for her party in the EU parliament, more than Macron’s, and landed a seat in France’s parliamentary assembly.
It used to be that far-right parties were unelectable in liberal democracies. But the story of fear and grievance told by ethnic entrepreneurs—the myths and losses of sons of the soil—prove irresistible to an audience made captive by social media. “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” one Facebook executive has noted. According to the same executive, populism triggers reactions that are “incredibly strong” and “primitive” by appealing to emotionally charged subjects like “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.” In Sweden, the stories on Samhällsnytt and Nyheter Idag were designed with this in mind: to create fear for Swedes’ safety, for the safety of their families, and for their culture and society. If these websites were your main sources of news—surfaced and reinforced by algorithms—you would quickly come to believe that Sweden was falling apart and that immigrants and the far left were to blame. It would be nearly impossible for anyone to persuade you otherwise.
People don’t realize how vulnerable Western democracies are to violent conflict. They have grown accustomed to their longevity, their resilience, and their stability in the face of crises. But that was before social media created an avenue by which enemies of democracy can easily infiltrate society and destabilize it from within. The internet has revealed just how fragile a government by and for the people can be.
for Shane Bauer, a thirty-three-year-old Berkeley grad with an unkempt beard, to join one of America’s largest militia groups. All he did was go on Facebook and begin to like the many militia sites that popped up. Bauer wanted to join a militia group not because he believed he or his family needed protection. Bauer was an award-winning journalist—and in 2016 he wanted to investigate what was going on behind the scenes in the militias emerging across America.
He liked three different groups: the Three Percenter Nation, the Patriotic Warriors, and the Arizona State Militia. If you like these pages, Facebook then automatically generates additional suggestions of other militia pages. (When I searched Facebook for “Arizona state militia,” it gave me a choice of five different Arizona militias to join.) Facebook does all the work connecting you with any community you’re interested in—even the most extreme.
Bauer liked all these pages. But to be accepted to the private Facebook groups, he had to convince the owners that he was sincere. So he opened a Facebook account and began to post negative material about Barack Obama and memes about American flags. He wrote blog posts about the threat of Syrians traveling to Mexico in order to more easily cross the border illegally into the United States. He then sent dozens of friend requests to people he found on the Facebook pages of different militias. “Within a couple of days I had more than 100 friends,” he reported. Shortly after that, Bauer saw the Three Percent United Patriots’ private Facebook group called “Operation Spring Break.” When he requested and received access, he learned about an upcoming event—a border protection operation along Arizona’s border with Mexico. According to information posted on Facebook, all Bauer had to do was show up with his own weapons, medical supplies, and body camera. That’s exactly what he did.
There’s no better way to organize people today than social media—especially if those people are feeling aggrieved or threatened. It is how the Arab Spring protesters organized in 2011, how the 2017 Women’s March came together, and how the Black Lives Matter movement initially gained traction. But when this power to draw like-minded people intersects with extremist, outrage-driven narratives—and a thirst for violence—it creates a powder keg. Members of nascent movements now use the internet to find one another, to organize, to disrupt peaceful protests, and to equip themselves for a cause. They can now easily share information on how to make bombs and use secure online chats to contact foreign military advisers with combat experience. In addition, Facebook hosts “sprawling online arms bazaars, offering weapons ranging from handguns and grenades to heavy machine guns and guided missiles.” J. M. Berger, a longtime expert on violent extremism, has followed the progression of white nationalist groups on social media since 2012, when most of these groups had only a few followers. Four years later, most had increased their followers by over 600 percent. And by 2018, according to Berger, “hundreds of thousands of new and legacy racist extremists had flooded the platform.” Since 2018, the number of white nationalist groups has dropped somewhat, although overall membership in such organizations does not appear to have declined, suggesting that there’s consolidation happening, as popular groups—such as the Proud Boys—beat out smaller competing ones.
The world saw the organizing power of social media with the rise of the Islamic State, which has used websites, chat rooms, and sites like Twitter to disseminate propaganda that radicalizes individuals in the comfort of their living rooms. It has convinced at least thirty thousand citizens from about one hundred different countries to join its battle in Syria. Social media has been so instrumental for these purposes that, as one Islamic State defector noted, its practitioners are rewarded accordingly. “The media people are more important than the soldiers….Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic States.”
It used to be that one of the main challenges violent extremist groups faced was how to raise money, especially if they did not control territory. But apps now make it easy to transfer money instantaneously across borders, making even the smallest fringe groups viable. Vera Mironova, a Russian American academic, asked one of the founders of a new rebel group formed in Syria in 2011—Mahgerin al-Allah—how they acquired funding. “The first thing I did when I took this job,” he explained, “was to make a YouTube video about the group. I asked group leaders to gather as many people as they could…to show how big the group was; bring all the weapons and cars they had…to show that they were well equipped; and wear uniforms and stand in military formation. I just had to show that they were professional.” The group received financial support from a wealthy Syrian living in the Persian Gulf.
Once you have people organized and radicalized, social media itself offers the very match that lights this powder keg. The collective fear and sense of threat created by extremist videos and rhetoric shifts power to those itching for a fight. According to Erica Chenoweth, these violence entrepreneurs almost always try to interject themselves into nonviolent resistance movements and push these movements to the extreme—and the easiest way to do this is social media, where they can agitate and provoke to great effect. This appears to be what happened with the “yellow vest” protest movement in France, when outside radicals and agitators joined its Facebook groups in order to advocate for violence. According to Renée DiResta, an expert on the abuse of information technology, these are the “people who are more likely to set things on fire.”
Ultimately, it’s the algorithms of social media that serve as accelerants for violence. By promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, these algorithms give rise to a growing sense of despair. Disinformation spread by extremists discredits peaceful protesters, convinces citizens that counterattacks by opposition groups are likely, and creates a sense—often a false sense—that moderates within their own movement are not doing enough to protect the population, or are ineffective and weak compared to the opposition. It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.
Fueled by social media, they come to believe that compromise is simply not possible.