Authority and information
We laugh mockingly at the North Korean regime, which allows only selected members of the nomenclature, with a few university exceptions, to access the Internet. For the rest of the population, the state kindly prepared an intranet network - for their internal needs - monitored and controlled, after all, like almost every aspect of social life in that country. At the same time, North Korea as a state supports hacker groups, the most famous of which is the Lazar Group, which skillfully threatens global cyber security, so that the State Department recognized it as such. Hacker groups sometimes steal money from banks, sometimes blackmail cryptocurrency users, and part of the cyber loot goes to the budget of the state that supports them.
Almost all authoritarian regimes tend to put the "network of all networks" under their own control and limit the wider masses, who shape public opinion, access to information that they consider to threaten the existing political order. Although many examples border on the bizarre, they still show how the fear of information, its spread and influence on social dynamics is a big problem for regimes with an admixture of authoritarianism. At one time, Assad shut down the Internet in Syria in order to deny information to the rebels, and at the same time, supporting the Syrian Electronic Army - the name is somewhat surreal - he attacked the world and regional media that reported on the protests. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is not yet 85 years old, claims that the Internet is an enemy's invention, and therefore it is necessary for Iran to use advanced technological solutions to fight against social networks, as well as video platforms, such as YouTube, Netflix and HBO. Measurements say that the Internet in Iran is among the top five slowest in the world, and the slowness of the Internet is, along with repression, the best medicine against inordinate consumers of Internet content. By the way, the Ayatollah himself is present on Western social networks and, unfortunately, since we do not know his TV habits, we can neither confirm nor deny whether he ever watches something from popular video platforms.
As great powers, Russia and China regulate the Internet in a relatively similar way, politically and technologically speaking. President Putin, otherwise fascinated by sovereignty, applies this term to the Internet as well, dreaming of complete Russian digital sovereignty, safe from any external influence and interference. The Russian president - maybe it's a remnant of Cold War communication like a direct "red phone" between the Kremlin and the White House - dreams of his own Internet cables and independent infrastructure that enable complete control of information. At the same time, hacker groups that are considered to be under the control of the regime take advantage of the security flaws of Western partners, as well as the habits of Internet users. The interference in the US presidential election is one example of this, the successful espionage of the military leadership of Germany - that is the last known example - shows external hacking activities. In the wake of the Great Wall of China, which once protected the empire from outside enemies, the Chinese regime developed the Great Firewall, which, like all firewalls, filters internet traffic, blocks, if necessary, access to dangerous information, sites and monitors the interactions of internet users.
How do democracies do it?
Limitation of information from the inside and attacks from the outside are completely expected when it comes to regimes that possess certain authoritarian characteristics. But how do large democracies regulate the Internet? According to the House of Representatives, one of the two houses of the US Congress, even the biggest power in the world has a problem with social networks, especially when it comes to a network that is considered to be in the hands of China: and thus TikTok is about to be shut down , and between 150 and 170 million users in America could be left without one of their favorite daily activities. The legal proposal would force the owner of the aforementioned platform, the Beijing-based company ByteDance, to sell its flagship within 180 days, or be banned from operating in the Western political hemisphere. Goodbye, then, to carefree scrolling, goodbye to short videos, unless the Upper House, the US Senate, decides otherwise. TikTok is the most powerful social network, which perfectly matches the modern user needs: it is fast, the minimum of text, the maximum of carefreeness, the slightly comical interface is ideal for short videos. If Facebook is now a social network for retirees, Twitter for the scribal-minded part of the population, Instagram for visual types and advertisers, TikTok is for fast and interactive types: young people who generate content and older people who casually enjoy it. However, when last year's articles that heroically presented Osama bin Laden, followed by those that were pro-Palestinian, appeared and overflowed, some kind of alarm rang among the members of the House of Representatives, in which the average age, by the way, is 58,4 years. . Old enough to realize that the platform can influence public opinion and then the political climate, and user data, most likely, is shared by the owner himself with official Beijing.
It's about national security and an attack on critical infrastructure - understandable, but the bill still violates the US Constitution in many respects, so the final showdown with TikTok is far from over. And so the senseless habits of users who spend hours and hours on social networks scrolling pages or simply watching nonsense, have become a first-class political challenge almost everywhere in the world. Although the answers vary from rigid authoritarian to softer, democratic type, they still have a common desire to maintain a monopoly over information that does not disturb the existing political order and prevents a wider change of public opinion.
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