Democracy hacked

Abstract

A decade ago, people all over the world thought of technology as an answer to everything. The digital revolution, as promised by Silicon Valley, was meant to topple dictators, and help democracy flourish. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, and CEO of Facebook called the internet a “force of peace in the world” in 2015, with the belief that Facebook was creating a “global community” with a common understanding of issues confronting humankind . The tables have turned quite a lot since then, to say the least, which was first noticed by countries all over the world after the 2016 US Presidential elections. Since then, we have had numerous instances that have opened the eyes of the world to the fact that social media is a lot more than just the “force of peace” that we all envisioned it to be. This other side of the coin was something that the world was not prepared to deal with. Even the CEOs of the most tech savvy companies did not anticipate something like this, as clear from the statement of Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google