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/ Canadian Government Executive
// December 2016
Governing Digitally
porters by word-of-mouth. Instead, inflammatory antics and often
questionable assertions, many delivered in the Twittersphere,
created a vortex of attention and awareness that transcended all
other forms of media. What emerged is a new form of political
discourse, one where assertions become truth before evidence
can be mounted in support or to refute. (“Post-truth” is the Oxford
Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016. It defines the new adjec-
tive as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective
facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to
emotion and personal belief.”)
Along with Twitter, caught in the crosshairs of the election has
been Facebook, accused of being a venue for misinformation and
fake news and an inadvertent enabler of Trump’s rise to promi-
nence. Back in April,
Vanity Fair’s
Nick Bilton wrote a story en-
titled, “How Silicon Valley Created Donald Trump.” The piece
reported that some Facebook employees had even gone as far as
asking founder Mark Zuckerberg whether the company had a re-
sponsibility to try to stop him.
Within weeks of the election, Zuckerberg announced it would
launch initiatives to stem the flow of falsehoods and to bring more
transparency to news sourcing and quality. Such steps amount
to a partial retreat for the Facebook CEO who has long claimed
that his company was not a media entity but rather a platform
for openness and sharing (and thus agnostic to content and the
responsibilities of curation).
Others, however, have argued that Facebook and other social
media companies are the real winners of an election that upend-
ed traditional journalism and their pollster cousins. In an insight-
ful piece in
WIRED Magazine
(11/15/16), Issie Lapowsky writes:
“Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It
wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for
interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—
however controversial those conversations often were.” She
quotes a Clinton operative on the importance of an “earned media
strategy”, primarily through social, that will now define politics.
Beyond social media, there is big data and its role in public safe-
ty and in shaping the fluid balance between privacy and security.
For candidate Trump, however, there would be no ambiguity as
he called for a public boycott of Apple when the company refused
to assist the FBI in cracking the encryption of its flagship, iPhone.
Separately, Trump added: “We’re going to get Apple to build their
damn computers and things in this country instead of in other
countries.”
Such comments underscore the heightened chasm that be-
tween Silicon Valley and Donald Trump’s Washington D.C. This
chasm threatens to undo or at least recast many of the White
House initiatives aimed at improving government operations
through digital reforms and the importation of staff from technol-
ogy companies (Obama’s so-called stealth team of tech activists
brought into the executive branch).
More fundamentally, Trump’s emphasis on social messaging,
border security and public safety denotes a major departure from
the principles of openness and engagement sought, admittedly
withmixed success, by the Obama Administration. The aforemen-
tioned OGP, therefore, may well become little more than quaint
recognition of a mainly aspirational notion of Gov 2.0, namely
more transparent and participatory governance. The new face of
digital government is likely to become more inward, centralized,
and control-minded, not only in the US but perhaps especially in
those countries where democracy is most fragile.
If the Arab Spring personified the global hopes for an Obama
Presidency as a catalyst for both positive technological and dem-
ocratic change, today’s Middle East is a starkly different reality.
Egypt is firmly under military rule, Syria lies in ruins, and Turkey
is in full blown democratic retreat, led by an autocrat who has
routinely sought to contain social media. It is impossible today
to imagine Turkey as a onetime aspirant to the European Union.
The EU, now facing an existential crisis in the wake of the Brex-
it vote, was dubbed “the first casualty of digital democracy” by
Dhruva Jaishankar of the Brookings Institute.
As Turkey and Russia grow closer, moreover, there is much
speculation that autocratic leanings may enjoin the leaders of
these countries and President Trump in a new global compact
predicated upon anti-terrorism. Russia is already a hotbed of on-
line surveillance both domestically and abroad, and it recently
suspended LinkedIn’s operations over its data sharing and stor-
The new face of digital government is
likely to become more inward, centralized,
and control-minded, not only in the US
but perhaps especially in those countries
where democracy is most fragile.