Defyiing democracy, surrendering to corporations

Abstract

In the face of a new political scenario in Latin America, the irruption of communities into digital social media plays a fundamental role in the erosion of democratic institutions. Users´ perceptions of their interactions with peers, which are not mediated by political or news institutions, make them question and discredit the bodies that had regulated their political lives up to date. The questioning and distrustful look over State representatives, political corporations and opinion shapers does not correlate with the new actors defining social, political and cultural guidelines within the private sector. Therefore, while citizens fear the way the State will use the information collected from them, the handing over of sensitive data from those very citizens to transnational corporations which hold dominant positions in the global market is not called into question. Neither is how those data are being used by these companies to monetize their business and erode the democratic system. The manipulation of information deriving from the analytics collected by these corporations, which can be used to manipulate elections or define health policies, has brought about consequences in specific countries, but threatens the principles of liberty and equality of the whole system. This work is concerned with the analysis of the actions of users on the Internet, their impact on the construction of news and the weakening of democratic institutions in the second decade of the 21st Century.