What do you think of the state of world politics today?

A TED talk with Carole Cadwalladr is causing a stir because she blames Facebook for the destruction of liberal democracy.

Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy

She dared to personally accuse Zuckerberg at the Silicon Valley tech culture event, explaining how tech companies took us to this dangerous point in world politics.

As a journalist for the English Observer, she has researched how a city in Wales that benefits more from EU funding programmes than any other has had the highest Leave vote rate in England.

She asked people on the street why they had voted Leave and got the startling response that the EU had done nothing for them and they wanted to regain control of their country.Migration played a major role in the declarations. The city literally does not have immigrants with whom it could have had problematic experiences to explain this opinion.

It turns out that the referendum in the city was not discussed and decided in public forums, but was prepared on Facebook, where targeted advertising from the Leave camp agne has determined opinions on the referendum.

The challenge of today’s world politics revolvesto a large extent鈥攁bout this new disorder in the relationship between public, democracy, power, money, influence, and legal regulation.

As an example of the imbalance in the relationship between the forces, which enables a liberal, open society, Cadwalladr cites laws in England that have successfully influenced (foreign) money and power interests in democratic elections for 100 years. to limit.These laws have set the playing field for England’s democracy, on which both ordinary citizens and established power interests could meet on an equal footing (at least in principle).

Facebook’s advertising model has “disrupted” these laws鈥攂ecause there are no limits to funding propaganda through advertising on a tech platform.For example, Facebook has helped the power interests that see democracy as an adversary to power.

The attempt to get information on Facebook about who got what advertising and who financed it was fended off by Facebook.However, where public transparency is not possible, there can be no open political opinion-forming process and no laws can be formulated to limit abuse.

Cadwallandr describes how Brexit has been just a petri dish for the strategy of the anti-democratic forces that have ensured the election of Trump in the US and the right-wing radicals in Europe, not to mention the ability of the disinformation campaigns radical religious forces such as IS or a host of radical minority interests that exert disproportionate influence on our world through Facebook.

It brings it to a sobering point: free, democratic elections are no longer possible today.This battle is already lost. The foundations of liberal democracy have been destroyed by Facebook and the other tech companies.

The question of today’s world politics is directed to the future: will we be able to restore democratic politics, or is it our destiny to be at the mercy of power interests that do not care about our well-being?

Various leaders would be pleased with the latter variant.However, the vast majority of us are not doing very well.

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