Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In March 2018, The Observer revealed a comprehensive scheme of political manipulation via Facebook - a social network with more than 2 billion users - for the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth American President and the victory of BREXIT in the UK. In October 2018, during Brazilian presidential elections, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo denounced a platform for mass spreading political messages in favor of one of the candidates through WhatsApp, which was not under the current electoral regulation, then constituting an electoral crime. In response to The Observer’s revelations, the American Congress called Mark Zuckerberg to give an explanation as to how his social network allowed such an undemocratic strategy. In the Brazilian case, the Superior Electoral Court granted a statement saying it could not do much since it was not under their power to regulate the encrypted environment of WhatsApp. In the end, WhatsApp itself took down the platforms, but in no time to stop them from influencing the elections. Both cases offer evidence for the emergence of new online spaces where political disputes and democratic processes are increasingly taking place; and the dislocation of political authority and power from state to private social network global corporation. Given this context, is it possible to characterize social network as a new state form, able to exert sovereignty and rule as much as a traditional nation-state? This study explores this question under the light of Henri Lefebvre’s literature on state form and spatialities of politics.