Social Media’s Affect on Democracy
https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-freedom-net-2017-manipulating-social-media-undermine-democracy
Recent events have resulted in many people addressing “fake news” and “censorship” and its use by governments to influence elections. The internet is available to use by anyone in order to influence the elections, even those that are not directly affected by it(from other countries). This can exhibit many problems, especially with how powerful and easy influence is able to be in social networks. The article addressed the idea of how this influence can be used to essentially bypass the idea of democracy and a true representation of the people being represented and instead results in more towards who can be the more influential and who helps out who the most, even if those that are helping aren’t actually a part of the country or the election in the first place.
This can be tied into our looking at networks and the influence of nodes on one-another when they are connected. When “fake news” is implemented into social media it has an influence on nearby “nodes” of people and this allows it to spread, this may be able to be balanced out with the normal influence of social media and remain a balanced democracy. But, once you also include censorship then the balanced influences become very one-sided as the balancing factors of the “normal” influence is suppressed and does not have as much of an effect. Governments and those that control the media are also able to essentially insert new nodes as well as they see fit that allows them to best influence towards what they want.