Growing up in China, I had no concept of democracy—or monarchy, or totalitarianism. I just thought that there was only one party and one leader in each country, and mine was the Chinese Communist Party, and Xi Jinping. I remember the vivid image of President Xi on national television, paying a visit to China’s poor, rural villages. I remember how happy the villagers looked, how loudly the children cheered. I had been completely instilled with propaganda that said my president was a kind, loving man, and that China’s society was the happiest and wealthiest. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t express my every thought, or speak freely of my ideas, because there was nothing to discuss.

I was a little boy, living under a totalitarian government, with very limited access to information, so naturally I was easily swayed by propaganda! But what if even grown adults living in the United States, with access to all kinds of information, are being manipulated just as effectively? What if they’re oblivious to it, because “This is the United States! There’s no propaganda here” and because the outlet distributing much of the propaganda is a household name?

Everybody knows Facebook’s euphoric success story. The social networking company’s innovation provided a better, faster way for people to share moments and connect via the internet. Within three years, Facebook added a whopping 350 million users, and eventually it became the first online service to reach one billion monthly active users. Striving relentlessly for profitability quarter after quarter, Mark Zuckerberg transformed his company into the ultimate advertising machine by mining Facebook users’ personal information and data. This made ads on Facebook mind-bogglingly effective compared to traditional advertisements, since businesses could target their exact audience by age, interests, behavior, and location. Of course, Facebook is just one out of many tech giants, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, that utilize their user data for profit. But while using data to target consumers might be considered good business, using it to target voters and manipulate their beliefs and opinions is arguably immoral.

Yet an obscure private intelligence company out of London, UK enabled political campaigns to do just that. In 2010, Cambridge Analytica targeted and manipulated voters to shift the outcome of the 2010 Trinidad and Tobago general election, without anyone finding out until much later. Cambridge Analytica, for the first time, was able to demonstrate the staggering power of data to corrupt the democratic process. In the 2019 documentary, The Great Hack, Alexander Nix, the CEO of the company, described their involvement as follows:

“We were working for the Indians. We went to the client and we said, ‘We want to target the youth and we want to try and increase apathy.’ The campaign had to be non-political, because the kids don’t care about politics. It had to be reactive because they’re lazy. So we came up with this campaign that was all about being part of the gang, doing something cool, being part of a movement, and it was called the ‘Do So’ campaign. Do So, don’t vote. It’s a sign of resistance against not the government but politics and voting… We knew that when it came to voting, all Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn’t vote, cause they Do So, but all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to, which is to go out and vote… The difference in 18-to-35-year-old turnout was like 40% and that swung the election about 6%, which was all we needed in an election that’s very close.”

Through voter suppression and misinformation, Cambridge Analytica disoriented young, vulnerable voters, and eroded their ability to act rationally and autonomously. Unfortunately, this was just one example of Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in elections. In 2018, the company’s executives admitted that the company had worked on more than 200 elections around the world—like the 2016 presidential election in the Philippines, where it helped rebrand the image of Rodrigo Duterte specifically to target voters who were swayed by tough and decisive qualities in a candidate.

Duterte’s victory might not have been possible without 1,175,870 Filipino Facebook users’ data. Cambridge Analytica had been collecting data on people’s personalities to better predict their behaviors and then influence them accordingly. How did they do it? One strategy was a simple app called “thisisyourdigitallife” that offered personality feedback to users while branding itself as a research tool for psychologists. The person behind the operation, Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, then sent users’ results to Cambridge Analytica without permission, which was a violation of Facebook’s privacy policies. What’s more, since the 270,000 users who participated in the survey allowed Kogan to collect information on their friends as well, in total, more than 87 million Facebook users’ data was compromised. In 2016, Nix made the astonishing revelation that Cambridge Analytica had close to 5,000 data points on over 230 million American voters. With this massive amount of data, the company “bombarded them through blogs, websites, articles, videos, ads, every platform you can imagine, until they saw the world the way we wanted them to,” according to Brittany Kaiser, another executive at Cambridge Analytica. Their strategy was to flood people’s media feeds with highly biased content. From their first click on the targeted content, users targeted by this strategy are guided to similar content from that side of the political spectrum, again and again, decreasing the presence of alternative sources of information until it becomes impossible to see the other side. This never-ending cycle not only reinforces a person’s political ideologies, but also hinders the kind of discussion between opposing viewpoints that is fundamentally necessary in a democratic society.

Cambridge Analytica’s string of successful election manipulations might never been stopped, had evidence not emerged about fraudulent practices in the 2016 election campaign that helped Donald Trump win the presidency. The company’s powerful leveraging of data analytics into precise microtargeting proved ideal for deploying fear- and anger-based messages that undermine individual reasoning and rational choice by playing on people’s emotions. This proved both successful and destructive to democracy on a national level.

The situation today with consumer data, concentrating immense power in the hands of a few companies, is comparable to historical monopolies like John D. Rockefeller’s massive oil empire in the Gilded Age. Rockefeller controlled some 90% of all U.S. oil refineries and pipelines, enabling him to generate huge profits from what was then the world’s most lucrative commodity: oil. Antitrust laws eventually broke up Rockefeller’s monopoly, but unless the necessary legal infrastructure is put in place to protect users’ privacy and rein in companies like Facebook and Google, more Cambridge Analyticas will come along to exploit today’s most lucrative commodity: data.

What if powerful people who know everything about you are using that information to influence what you think, who you talk to, and how you vote? Doesn’t that sound a lot like totalitarianism? What if they use the latest technology to make their propaganda machine invisible, enabling them to manipulate people just like I was manipulated as a child, watching those images of Xi Jinping? Wouldn’t that endanger our ability to think and express opinions freely, debate and decide the issues based on facts, and rule ourselves fairly and wisely? Wouldn’t that be a major threat to glorious democracy itself?

As I got older, however, I was told what questions were important to ask. By that, I mean that I started going to school. At its core, the educational system in this country indoctrinates more than it enlightens. Students memorize facts, chronology, and processes only to regurgitate them for tests. Critical thinking skills are, at best, a sidebar from this rigid trajectory. The students follow and the results are as follows – obeying the rules, believing what is taught is true, and completing tasks on time enables students to become a cohort of obedient, unquestioning automatons ready for the modern-day workforce.

As I moved through the system, I grew disenchanted with the process. The single-file march forward had turned the majesty of every subject into a mundane set of equations or facts I needed to memorize for the sole purpose of receiving high marks on tests. As a result, my untaught curiosity was dying on the vine. Not to say that I was a lost cause, but I was a little lost. By pure luck, I gravitated toward the subject of philosophy, where I rekindled my former inquisitiveness. In doing so, I observed thinking in action, ways of formulating arguments and picking them apart. I discovered a mental muscle that flexes reason and rationality the more I read.

Because of this journey, I believe our educational system would create a more compassionate, prudent, and informed citizenry if it embraced the discipline of philosophy as a part of that curated sequence. Philosophy is centered around discovering the truth. The subject asks its practitioners to question the validity of everything – from what one is told to the social structure one is living in. In no way am I suggesting that students should study philosophy to ignite revolutions and eradicate the entire education system; instead, I am advocating for a middle ground between the essential subjects and the critical reasoning skills through philosophy being taught to students.

Today, more than ever, critical thinking skills have become critical. In an era of hyper-social networking and data distribution, misinformation and fake news have become commonplace. Chiefly, social media – with its lax regulations for factual content – has become an exhibition of fake news. What’s more, it has taken over the lives of teenagers today. Students today are ill-equipped with skills like critical thinking and reasoning to recognize false information. According to a 2015 study done by Stanford University, a group of high school students failed to distinguish a legitimate news source from a fake one. Shown two posts on Facebook announcing Donald Trump’s candidacy for President, one from the verified Fox News account (with its blue checkmark indicating the account’s legitimacy) and the other from a fake Fox News account, only a quarter of the students recognized the blue checkmark and identified it as legitimate. Even worse, over thirty percent of the surveyed students claimed the fake account was more trustworthy because of some key graphic elements it included. This demonstrates that, despite having been raised with technology, teenagers still lack basic awareness for verified digital information. Pew Research Center report indicates that six-in-ten adults in America obtain their news from social media sites, and 51 percent of them had not only encountered fake news but also shared them with other people. It is evident from this report, the general public has not been educated to discern what they consume for the most basic ingredient – truth.

A nation is most at risk when its people are easily swayed by malicious forces intending to create tension and conflict. People, organizations, and governments – both domestic and foreign – have used fake news to their advantage to intensify social conflict, undermining any efforts by the people to compromise. The most virulent use to date, though, is as a conspiracy-theory factory. A web of seemingly disparate articles suddenly can make the most outlandish ideas appear real to the untrained eye.
An infamous example of this is the 2016 incident dubbed “Pizzagate.” In a bizarre story, Edgar Maddison Welch, a father of two, had learned from the Info-Wars host Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton – the presidential candidate and former First Lady – was sexually abusing children in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. You can make this stuff up. In fact, you can only make this stuff up. Yet, Welch and his friends reacted to such an absurd story by grabbing an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a .38 handgun, and a folding knife and traveling to the store to investigate. Strolling into the kitchen, he fired shots to intimidate the “pedophiles” operating in the basement, only to find that there was no basement in the restaurant and no captive children. Instead, he discovered cooking supplies and pizza dough.

There is a media ecosystem that manufactures an alternative reality. The “news” Welch had heard originated from a Facebook post, which was then spread to Twitter and gained viral attention with the aid of far-right platforms like Breitbart and Info-Wars reporting it. An investigation launched afterward revealed ordinary people, online activists, bots, foreign agents, and domestic political operatives working together for political purposes. Lacking critical thinking skills, which reflexively seek ethos and logos, people are doomed to the creative whims of online manipulation. Luckily, nobody was hurt during this instance. But, imagine what kind of future threats fake news could generate? Could innocent civilians be killed in a baseless conflict? Could malicious politicians or leaders start a war solely based on lies and falsehoods? Could entire populations be manipulated by the government through fake media? The possibilities are horrifying.

So, what can teaching philosophy to children at schools achieve? Well, it is certainly not a cure for the world’s current or future woes, nor is it the ultimate stimulant for employment or economic growth. But one thing is clear: philosophy in our classrooms would better equip us with the thinking and reasoning skills required to perceive the conventional wisdom of our age, to protect us from today’s technologically advanced manipulations. Some educators have already made moves in bringing philosophy to schools. Jane Mohr Lone, the founder of the University of Washington Center of Philosophy for Children and the president of PLATO, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing philosophy to schools, can attest to the benefits of teaching the subject at educational institutions. In her 2012 book, “The Philosophical Child,” Lone recalls witnessing an extraordinary moment of a ten-year-old girl answering the question about whether we are real or a virtual simulation. “Okay,” the girl said, “Maybe I can’t know that I am not just the mind of a computer or living in a cave and seeing only shadows. But what I can know is that if I’m thinking about what I can know, I can be sure that at least there is me thinking, even that’s all I can know about myself or anything else.” Lone recorded in her book, “I told her that the philosopher René Descartes had come to a similar conclusion almost four hundred years ago.”

The brilliance of philosophy is that it teaches students to comprehend better, see the world differently, and clearly articulate their opinions. “It gives them all the skills we want them to learn,” Lone says. Although larger studies must be done to clearly outline the benefits of teaching philosophy at schools, educators’ experiences such as Lone’s already have delivered positive metrics. With each day, technology advances in ways beyond what we could have imagined. Instead of trying to keep up with the technology, is it not more beneficial to develop a defense mechanism for it? To learn philosophy and protect ourselves from biases, lies, and manipulations? Let’s be shepherds, not sheep. And the sooner we implement philosophy into the curriculum, the sooner we can free ourselves from the enemies of democracy: propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Sources:

(https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online)
(https://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/)
(https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/)
(https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/danger-social)
(https://phil.washington.edu/people/jana-mohr-lone)
(https://www.businessinsider.com/teaching-philosophy-in-schools-has-huge-impacts-2015-7)