Demagogues have played with the emotions of their followers and citizens throughout history but now technology has allowed the rise of a new phenomenon, the petty demagogue. Thousands of these petty demagogues are granted a direct line to the emotions of tens of millions of people who give them moral support, money and will show up whenever and wherever they’re told to. The petty demagogues have translated their social media power to real world strength and they don’t even need to tell anyone their names if they don’t want to.
This was demonstrated when an IT manager at Citi Group named Jason Gelinas was exposed as running a prominent website devoted to the QAnon conspiracy theory called Qmap.pub. Bloomberg reported that Gelinas was raking in over $3,000 a month from a Patreon account he had set up and connected to his website. Until he was exposed none of his followers even knew who he was.
This may have been acceptable so long as it was confined to the nether regions of cyberspace or even when it was a number of thugs trying to force their way into Downing Street but now that the conspiracy is being tweeted from the Oval Office by the most powerful man in the world it can no longer be ignored or left to the people responsible for facilitating such messages to police their own platforms.
A British solution has been meandering its way through the House of Commons since 2019 in the form of the Online Harms Bill. If passed into law this would give Ofcom regulatory powers to hold online platforms to account for harmful information on their websites. Originally intended to protect children from online abuse, the clause giving Ofcom teeth will also apply to those abusing the platforms to spread hatred.
Social media has changed our lives, mostly for the better, but it has brought into our field of vision a myriad of sources of information of dubious value without checks and balances. Governments have balked at getting involved over concerns of freedom speech. The result is the mess in Washington DC. Concerns over freedom of speech are all well and good but governments shouldn’t be content to outsource these important questions surrounding freedom of speech to social media companies.
Here in the UK the government must step up and make sure our rights to free speech are protected from those who would seek to deprive us of them but whose YouTube videos are more fun to watch than footage of democracy in action on BBC Parliament. The Online Harms Bill is the litmus test that will show us how serious this government is about curbing the power of the petty demagogue.
Marc Goldberg is a freelance writer