DEMOCRACY AT THE TEST OF THE INTERNET
Difficult to have the distance necessary to judge its time. The growth of the Internet for more than twenty years and especially the rapid development of information technologies that open a window on the world to the greatest number are two elements which announce a difficult era for democracy, obliged to rethink its mode of Functioning in a context where public speaking is no longer automatically linked to a validated identity.
I - THE REVOLUTION IS ON US
The advent of information technology and the "hyperconnection" society provides, for the first time in human history, the possibility of having access to all the information produced in the world and Being able to interact with them, taking part in discussions through social networks, but also being able to permanently exchange with this world that was essentially material and progressively virtual. Whether for example paying taxes, making medical appointments or exchanging with our loved ones, participating in public discussions, everything, by economy or because of an unquestionable practicality, "virtualizes" ". We are therefore collectively moving towards a phase of human development in which the citizen and the consumer are no longer physically present or represented little by little by their virtual identity.
It is far from the time of the Roman forum where a small number of citizens, otherwise free, rich and solely male, debated the politics of the city. Without regret for a time when democracy was awkwardly settling, we can see that the opening of all discussions to all connected citizens around the world entails a significant change in democracy. The new data is that in the current context of Internet speech, no validation of the identities of "e-citizens" is put in place. This is the main revolution of democracy which differentiates the latter and we begin to perceive it with that of the last generation who did not have access to connected terminals. There was a time, not so long ago, when voting but also speaking in an assembly, in a journalistic exchange, in books interposed and more generally in all the arenas of discussion were done in an identified way. That is to say by simply knowing who is speaking, who votes and who expresses himself on this or that subject. With the exception of pamphlets or certain works that were considered "transgressive" at the time, the anonymity of the citizen or participant in the public discussion was never the rule. Internet and social networks are introducing a consequent revolution in which anonymity has become the norm, thus making speech as valid as "identified" speech.
II - CRISIS OF MODERN DEMOCRACIES
Democracies suffer from this change in the nature of public speaking. While an identified citizen was responsible to the vote or to an assembly for his or her remarks, suffering both the stigma or consequences of the legal framework against slander, for example, than the support of his fellow citizens if his intervention was judged The Internet today allows for anonymous participation in debates, which can sometimes be misleading when someone pretends to be another person - or possibly criminal when a state, an enterprise or an organized group creates Social networks profiles of citizens that do not exist. These citizens do not vote but totally unbalance the public debate by creating a balance of power always at the disadvantage of the citizen participating in the discussions which does not follow a strategy of destabilization. These techniques are not new, they have always been the unworthy companions of democracy; Nevertheless, by their virtual multiplication, they shake up the very logic of public exchange. This poses an important question, which is the equal treatment of public speaking: how can we talk about the democratic freedom of e-participation without mentioning equality between e-citizens? This, surely, is a key question of our century.
The first fundamental challenge for both the citizen participating in the discussion and for public institutions in their political and technical choices is to succeed in changing their perception of the public sphere by integrating that the virtual debate is not constrained by To apply a mechanism of authentication of the identity of the citizen, and that consequently this same debate is invariably biased.
Some authoritarian political systems such as Vladimir Putin's Russia have fully grasped the destabilizing potential of other states through the unlimited use of anonymous identities. By creating troll factories (such as Savushkine Street in St. Petersburg), where bloggers work continuously under many hidden identities, the Russian regime has succeeded in anchoring in Russia but also in the spirit of a number Growing of citizens of narratives under the conspiracy theories, having the double effect of killing confidence in democratic institutions always supposed to be corrupt and of distilling in a sustainable way a conspiracy narrative, supposedly anti-elite and close to the people.
These profoundly toxic and agit-prop techniques are not only the prerogative of authoritarian regimes. Some major political parties in stable democracies are already using it, as was the case during the US presidential campaign in 2016, including robots on Twitter , with the sole aim of clearing the electorate in order to collect Additional political supporters. These robots or "bots" conceal their artificial nature by the use of names of private persons. They thus contribute to creating a lasting illusion of popular support for one or the other candidate and can obviously favor one of the two sides. This is a major problem for democracy. The theory of democratic participation is based precisely on the principle that all voices are equal and weigh equally in the discussion. Nevertheless, as we can see, all voices are not valid on the internet. For, on the one hand, if the relation between the electorate and the voters who actually have access to these virtual spaces of debate is made, not everyone is present and, on the other hand, part of the Present contributes either in anonymous form, or through false accounts to the discussion. This terribly upsets the perception that people have issues and political discussions.
This imbalance is particularly dangerous in the effects it produces on the media and on their perception of public debate. For example, in a few years, Twitter has become the quasi-main source of political information. The short format involves brief, direct and even simplified formulations. As the media market has become extremely competitive, this coupled with a pressure linked to the obligation to produce results much more than before, journalists will very often favor information whose cost in terms of time and money is virtually zero . This is dangerous because the message will be neutralized and supposedly objectified by the media, even though the result will be biased by sources that can, for example, in the case of a disinformation campaign such as that carried out by the Russian trolls on the attack on the Humanitarian convoy north of Aleppo in September 2016, dramatically shifting the information cursor to a distorted balance between valuable sources and invented information. This is also the central motor of what some call the post-truth society. It works on a simple principle: inventing facts, stating counter-truths will always bring journalists, in their concern to weigh the diversity of sources in order to objectify information, to place the cursor of their information processing on a balance Assumed. This equilibrium, placed at the equidistance of the proposed theses, will be artificial as long as counter-truths have been deliberately stated. It can be assumed that the public actors enunciating these false information do not themselves believe in the intellectual grossness of the reasoning behind them. Nevertheless, they gradually contribute to the anchoring in the public space of false and false ideas and thus allow a taming of the public opinion to these theses.
The second challenge, beyond the inequality of representation and participation on social networks, is undoubtedly to organize the debate on the Internet while respecting the multi-centuries-old logic which has emerged on the margins of the development of democratic systems and which rests On the principle of the full enjoyment of citizens' rights. This goes from the simple possibility of public expression, once the identity of the citizen confirmed, to the penalization of the most serious words issued against other people.
This debate is not absent from the discussion of virtual public policies. A significant number of political representatives but also civil society figures were moved by a supposed lack of rules on the Internet and called it a "no-law space". This is a half-truth: in 2016, the Internet appears rather as an extremely regulated space. In France alone, about 2900 laws govern a large number of activities on the web. Nonetheless, legislation focuses on two areas of virtual activity: the regulation of e-commerce and police measures to identify Internet users in the context of, for example, terrorist activities Or economic and financial crime. However, no text exists to date on the issue of virtual identity and the ensuing abuses and dangers to democracy. Hence the half-truth.
III - TAMING DIGITAL DEMOCRACY
Digital democracy, often called by its English name "e-democracy", mainly comprises two dimensions: e-participation and e-voting. Today, they are only taken into account in an embryonic way in the French and European electoral law. Nevertheless, France and Estonia are good students by having developed (mainly for Estonia) tools allowing for example electronic voting . Under French law, the electoral code has recently been adapted to allow French voters to vote in parliamentary elections. A law extending the system in the presidential and European elections was nevertheless rejected in 2014. In connection with the question of the identification of voters to enable them to vote, only Estonia is really ahead, since that Member State of The European Union has provided all its citizens with a digital identity card with an electronic chip, enabling them, with a card reader, to identify themselves directly from their computer. French electoral law continues, for its part, to make the identification of the voter (in this case abroad) based on a (non-virtual) registration in the French register abroad.
The path that Estonia has taken in scouting is interesting in terms of e-voting. It allows a significant increase in participation, while ensuring a degree of voting security far superior to the French technique which always depends, ultimately , on the proper registration of the voter and an electronic voting device integrated with a reader Internet produced by a private company.Other systems exist such as the technology of block chains, which would make it possible to avoid criticisms concerning the control of personal data produced by e-democracy. Without wishing to debate the value of e-voting, it should nevertheless be noted that it is only one dimension of e-democracy and that e-participation suffers from the total lack of The legal framework.
In this field, Estonia is once again a pioneer, since in recent years comments on the pages of certain daily newspapers can only be made after the profiles of the commentator have been properly recorded after validation of his identity through his ID card. This framework for the possibility of on-line comments has been extremely debated in a country which, since 1991, is predominantly a liberal tradition and therefore wonders about the relevance of such a mechanism for participation in virtual discussions. It is certainly within the framework of this debate that reflection on public policies that seek to adapt democracy for information technologies must take place.
IV - THE BATTLE OF THE NET FOR E-DEMOCRACY
Any attempt to regulate a recent human activity is most often experienced by those who practice it as a liberticide. This is a psycho-legal constant. In France, for example, the debates concerning the first road code are particularly illustrative of this reflection. It is sufficient to read the preliminary considerations in the decree of December 31st, 1922, known as the "Code de la Route", in order to perceive how much the need to regulate the speed, content of road signs or license plates was not An evidence for contemporaries of the act.
The comparison here with e-participation makes particular sense. As for the development of social networks, the road code before 1922 is based on rules established by private initiatives (following the example of the Michelin Road Code). These modern and old resolutions lay down rules in the absence of the establishment of the law and temporarily fill a legal vacuum. These rules have no other obligation than to establish a modus vivendi between their users. This is therefore subject to all interpretations but does not in any way constitute a guarantee of the general interest guaranteed by the legislator. Unlike the lively debates of the 1920s on the liberticidal character of a speed limit on urban roads (which today seems to us as surreal), e-participation is not regulated , Except those set out by the "netiquette" of the major social networking companies. It is also interesting to note from a semantic point of view that the term chosen since the 1990s is a luggage-word that groups together the Internet and the label. It does not refer to the norms of legislative activity but rather to those of the perception of morals at a given moment, which differentiates it strictly from the law which theoretically has to take into account the general interest. Facebook, Twitter or Reddit therefore do not make laws by banning paintings representing nudes while allowing the expression of extremist parties, but apply a purely internal logic to the company. What do we do when the company in question counts half of humanity as customers? Would the proposal to force Facebook to establish a reliable system for validating its clients' identities be so unacceptable considering the millions of anonymous accounts or false accounts used for purposes that fall under the rule of law in the non- Virtual?
The prevalence of a libertarian ideology on social networks and the spaces of computer discussion which consists in defending the principle of absolute freedom of the public space of discussion by refusing all control of identities must now be erased in favor of A political approach which would consider limiting the "democratic" phenomena mentioned above. Of course, as virtual spaces are interconnected in the world, such an approach will inevitably have to be made through international agreements. As in the case of the Highway Code, in order to wind up the car comparison, such an agreement could be made, as was the case for the first time on the occasion of the Convention on Road Traffic signed in Geneva in 1949. Nevertheless, The issue of e-participation has broad implications in terms of the model of society that states want to know.
This problem is very complex and has many implications, including an extremely deliberate political action in a public space where the Internet has become synonymous with freedom. Such measures could be immediately labeled liberticides. This may be the reason why the great democracies do not risk it, considering phenomena such as the rise of populism, ultra-nationalisms or a political discourse of "the after-truth" only as exogenous in Of the public space.
However, in the near future, steps will have to be taken to rationalize virtual participation in democracy. The Estonian example offers an excellent solution that would limit the phenomena of trolling, robot twitters or massive disinformation. This should, however, be coupled with authentication measures for e-citizens through a dedicated device and with a necessary discussion with the e-participation giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. This prefigures epic struggles to bring the internet into a form of democratic maturity which it is still far away today and in so doing to save democracy.
Gabriel Richard-Molard
Secretary for European Affairs, Federation of French Abroad of the Socialist Party
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