Andree Media War

Dark Tech and Populists are Seizing Power
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-593-46228-8
Verlag: Campus Verlag GmbH
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

We see it every day - the increasingly bitter and more strident battle for power and supremacy in digital media. But who's actually fighting against whom? Internationally renowned media expert Martin Andree shows how a coalition of Dark Tech, Trump and right-wing populists is openly making a power grab in a bid for autocracy. They are more and more in control of the public sphere via digital monopolies and thus the very foundation of our democracies. With each passing day, it gets harder to save our free world. Will we still be able to turn things around? Or will Europe end up divided, facing chaos and civil war?

Prof. Dr. Martin Andree lehrt Medienwissenschaft an der Universität zu Köln. Er forscht seit mehr als 15 Jahren zur Dominanz von Big Tech. Führende deutsche Medien (u.a. öffentlich-rechtliches Fernsehen und führende Zeitungen) und Konferenzen (u.a. der Digitalgipfel der Bundesregierung) greifen für Beiträge zu diesem Thema regelmäßig auf seine Expertise zurück. Im Jahr 2020 veröffentlichte er den hoch angesehenen »Atlas der digitalen Welt«. Er erhielt den Günter-Wallraff-Sonderpreis für Pressefreiheit und Menschenrechte für das Buch »Big Tech muss weg« (2023). Prof. Dr. Martin Andree teaches media science at Cologne University in Germany. He has been doing research on the dominance of Big Tech for more than 15 years. Leading German media (including public television and leading newspapers) and conferences (including the Digital Summit of the Federal German Government) regularly call on his expertise for contributions on this subject. In 2020, he published the book »Atlas der digitalen Welt«, which has a strong reputation. He received the Günter Wallraff Special Award for Press Freedom and Human Rights for his book »Big Tech muss weg!« (2023), which has also been published in English (»Big Tech Must Go!«, 2025). He studied in Cologne, Münster, Cambridge and Harvard.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Andree, Martin

Leseproben

Chapter 1.
The combat zone

Game over, democracy?

We experience ‘media war’ every day online. Superficially, terms like shitstorms, hate speech, rants, gaslighting, trolling or doxxing spring to mind. But, on another level, the ‘media war’ phenomenon emerged many years ago, when digital media began to attract more and more attention and overshadowed the ‘old media’, i.?e. newspapers, television and radio. Since the noughties, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of a handful of monopolistic US digital platforms and the decline of analogue media.

However, the well-known side effects of polarisation, fake news and disinformation are causing massive collateral damage in Western democracies1?—?the media war has increasingly developed into a war for truth, legitimacy and media freedom, which is infecting more and more of the Western world, starting in the USA.

A political outsider has taken full advantage of this dynamic. Donald Trump was surprisingly elected President of the USA in 2016 due to his aggressive use of Twitter, particularly through the systematic spread of lies and ever new, spectacular false claims: “I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter,” he said when he became President.2 Twitter versus ‘mainstream media’: the destruction of truth began its journey, the post-truth era began.3

Immediately after taking office, he took the media war to the next level by insulting the established editorial media, calling it ‘fake news’. In a meme video, he is shown knocking CNN, as embodied by a person, to the ground. Since then, the belief in supposedly ‘left-wing mainstream media’, ‘State-censored editorial offices’ or ‘lying press’ has spread among supporters of digital platforms in the Western world, with increasingly aggressive hostility towards journalists and editorial offices, who are sometimes insulted and treated like criminals.

After his election defeat in 2020, Trump spread the ‘stolen election’ lie online and incited his supporters to march to Congress to prevent the orderly handover of power to the new government. A little later, his followers actually stormed the Capitol. The attempted coup in turn made the owners of the digital platforms uneasy?—?they blocked Trump’s social media profiles. Although Trump, who was still President of the USA at the time, was fuming with rage, he had no choice but to yield to the power of Big Tech and its platforms as regards his social media profiles.

But it generated a response. Trump, who had been banned from the platforms, prepared his political comeback, launching his own platform, ‘Truth Social’. It has particularly permeable outlink structures, allowing him and his supporters to easily distribute content to the leading platforms, thus immunising him from the superiority of the tech companies. In the future, no one will be able to digitally ‘silence’ him.

At this point, the big tech billionaire Elon Musk arrived on the scene. In early 2022, he declared himself to be a “free speech absolutist”, rejected any form of content moderation as ‘censorship’, bought the Twitter platform on the spur of the moment and largely eliminated content curation structures in the company.4

Musk increasingly took Trump’s side, officially recommending him and interviewing him on X. At the same time, he increasingly took sides with other right-wing extremist groups and parties on the platform. He even actively campaigned for the German AfD. He rejects protests from advertising companies (“Go fuck yourself!”) and later sues them in antitrust proceedings?—?allegedly he is only concerned with ‘freedom of speech’. His view: the allegedly “left-wing” (?) advertising companies need to be prevented from influencing the content of the platform.5

Media war: We initially recognised that it was spreading ever wider, encompassing not only the media, but also the economy, politics and the law. The front lines originated in the USA but have long since been successfully imported to Europe, especially by right-wing populist groups such as the AfD in Germany, right up to Pegida, the ‘coronavirus deniers’ and a ‘storming of the Capitol light’, i.?e. an attack on the German parliament building in Berlin.6 And this war is being waged about many important things?—?about our democracy, about legitimacy and truth, about freedom, and above all about power, might and rule.

The digital media revolution

When ‘cool digital evangelists’ or the ‘heroes of the tech industry’ have spoken about the digital revolution in recent decades, they have repeatedly claimed that the change we are experiencing today is very similar to the media revolution set in motion by the invention of the printing press in the past. The printing press effectively did away with the supremacy of the Pope and then put an end to absolutism during the French Revolution.7

From the perspective of media history, it is at least true that such power struggles for media dominance are to be expected when old leading media are replaced by new ones. However, one aspect is worrying. From the broad perspective of media history, we can assume that, in the case of digital transformation, resistance would be just as pointless from a long-term perspective as the resistance of the old church elites against the printing press or the resistance of the French ancien régime against freedom of the press. Looking to the future, we can safely assume that the era of analogue media is drawing to a close. The media order of the future will undoubtedly be digital. Newspapers, television and radio will continue to melt away. Digital media will ‘rule’. In fact, they already are the leading media. Studies indicate that, since the Covid pandemic, more of the general public’s attention has been spent on digital media than on all analogue media combined.8 By 2029, the share of analogue media will fall to less than a quarter in Europe.9 It’s important to note that no outcry in the form of criticism of digital culture, no efforts at ‘regulation’, no vows of commitment to analogue ‘quality media’ can stop or reverse this development.10

In the current media war, the predominance of digital media will prevail (and to be clear, in this aspect, this war has long since been decided). We would also have to assume that this transformation should massively reinforce and expand the increase in media freedom by comparison with the last few centuries. From a media history perspective, the question arises: What is the new, hopefully better, digital order that this will create for us all? Is it really possible to identify a digital equivalent to the Reformation of the 16th century or the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, as Dark Tech companies’ and digital evangelists have always claimed?

And above all, who would then be the digital Martin Luther, the digital Franklin, Rousseau or Diderot? Do these digital figures already exist and should we already recognise them out there on the horizon of this new, improved digital media order? Are they ‘freedom fighters’ who are campaigning for this new order and using the manifold possibilities of the new, digital media for a new, better world? And are many millions of users, followers and supporters rallying to their cause?

Of course they exist?—?and now it’s getting scary. Here’s their rough narrative.