This model of digital autarky is inspired by that implemented by China. “Online medical consultations, bill payments, meal deliveries, private lessons… The Chinese regime has digitized everything, explains Paul Charon, director of the “Intelligence, anticipation and influence strategies” field at the Strategic Research Institute of the Military School (IRSEM). The goal is to completely seal off Chinese society.” An ecosystem tech custom-made, which is in reality only an exact copy of the applications developed by the giants of Silicon Valley and used massively in the West. Except that the data is well guarded, and that the “censorship and propaganda” aspect, which goes hand in hand with social control, is much easier to pilot from a home-made network.
3/ Destabilizing democracies from a distance
Despite this quest for digital autonomy, Big Tech platforms remain the perfect meeting place for autocratic regimes to spread their propaganda. In 2019, during the presidential elections held that year in Togo, Nigeria, Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2.8 million Facebook users were exposed to pages created by Archimedes Group, an Israeli company specializing in electoral influence. A role that Russia also takes very seriously, whether by deploying avalanches of fake accounts on Facebook during the “migrant crisis” in 2015, or by spreading anti-Semitic ideas in Europe in reaction to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. An ideological offensive that is also deployed through the creation of international media such as Russia Today or Sputnik, widely relayed on Facebook before their ban in France, but which continue to be active in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa.
TikTok, the preferred social network of young people, is also the channel favored by China to make protest content invisible and relay its propaganda, in particular by denying the persecution of the Uighur minority. Enough to raise an ethical question, formulated by Françoise Daucé: “Should we respond to censorship with censorship?” and block the networks that relay the propaganda of these regimes? Such an option risks making the intentions of autocratic regimes less readable: “The more clandestine it is, the more opaque it is, and the more difficult it is to contradict”notes the researcher. Without rapid responses to this problem, democracy risks becoming more and more like this “diminished and weakened adversary” about to lose the « bataille » which opposes it to technology, to use the words used by the English journalist Jamie Bartlett in his book Man or Machine? (De Boeck, 2019).
