Politics and technology

Politics and technology encompasses concepts, mechanisms, personalities, efforts, and social movements that include, but are not necessarily limited to, the Internet and other information and communication technologies. Scholars have begun to explore how internet technologies influence political communication and participation, especially in terms of what is known as the public sphere.
The smartphone is a communication technology that includes features such as voice calls, text messaging, internet access, email, images, video, and applications. Mobile devices are one of the important reasons for the rise of political participation and are now portrayed as a voting agent in the least developed countries. Increased availability of mobile phones, and subsequent access to the public sphere, has enhanced individuals' and groups' ability to bring attention to and organize around specialized issues.
More recently, social media has emerged as one of the main platforms for politics. Millions of users can learn about politicians' policies and statements, interact with political leaders, organize, and voice their own opinions on political matters. Political campaigns are also using social media sites to reach voters using political advertising.
There is also a wide variety of online tools meant to promote political participation and combat the spread of misinformation. A comparison of civic technology platforms can be useful in differentiating the different services offered by each platform.

The digital public sphere

The idea of the public sphere has generally come to be understood as the open social spaces and public spaces in which private citizens interact and share information and ideas relevant to society. These can include, for example, town halls, public squares, markets, coffee shops, or what ancient Greeks called agoras. Scholars have argued that these spaces are vital for creating and maintaining an active, informed public in a democratic society.
In Jürgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, he defines the public sphere as "a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed." In principle, the public sphere should be open to all citizens and free from influence from governments or private businesses. Habermas goes on to argue that:

"A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private affairs nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obey. Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely."

Howard Rheingold states that "There is an intimate connection between informal conversations, the kind that takes place in communities... and the ability of large social groups to govern themselves without monarchs or dictators." Rheingold and others have gone on to argue that virtual spaces created through the Internet and related information and communications technologies have led to the emergence of a new type of digital public sphere. Some scholars have conceptualized this alternately as a virtual public sphere or a networked public sphere, while still others have similarly described what they call a networked society or networked publics. Essentially, these new virtual spaces can be used in much the same way as traditional, offline spaces: that is, as a "free space" to discuss and debate ideas of public importance. Just as the public sphere is a combination of "every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public", the digital public sphere also comprises all forms of new media—such as chat rooms, website comment sections, and social media—in which private citizens engage in discourse as a public. Virtual spaces may overlap or interact with offline spaces as well, forming what has been called "hybrid networks".
Scholars argue that social media affords increasing opportunities for political discourse and mobilization within the digital public sphere. Research has shown that increased use of social media correlates with increases in certain types of political engagement and participation. Rabia Karakaya Polat, a politics and technology scholar, finds that the Internet leads to a more informed and better society. The Internet enables information to be dispersed at an increased rate, compared to traditional means, at little cost. For most users, the amount of information can be helpful to understand various political atmospheres but can also overwhelm users. The digital public sphere thus has the potential to enliven democratic culture and enhance the ability of citizens to challenge the political and economic power of governments and corporations, such as through online protests, activism campaigns, and social movements. Other scholars have highlighted, alongside economic globalization, the role of Internet technologies in reaching across national borders to contribute to a growing transnational public sphere.

Criticisms

Social exclusion

The traditional, offline public sphere has been criticized for not being as inclusive in practice as it is in theory. For example, Feminist scholars like Nancy Fraser have argued that the public sphere has historically not been as open or accessible to disadvantaged or marginalized groups in a society, such as women or people of color; therefore, such groups are forced to form their own separate public spheres, which she refers to as a counter-public or subaltern counter public.
Some scholars contend that online spaces are more open and thus may help to increase inclusive political participation from marginalized groups. In particular, anonymous online spaces should allow all individuals to speak with an equal voice to others. However, others have pointed out that many contemporary online spaces are not anonymous, such as Facebook. Avatars and social media profiles often portray an individual's offline identity, which can lead to practices of online discrimination and exclusion which mirror offline inequalities. Now, more and more historically disadvantaged or marginalized groups are also using Internet technology to carve out new online spaces for their own "networked counterpublics", such as through the use of hashtags like #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter.
Another example of social exclusion happens when users homogenize their information by finding information that reinforces their opinions or websites with the most content or are promoted consistently. This can lead users to ignore sites that are less frequently promoted. Evidence of this was discovered by Steven M. Schneider, who found that although participation was overwhelmingly large on internet chat rooms discussing politics of abortion, the chat log was influenced and controlled by users that contributed the most content, with those who responded less frequently typically agreeing or adjusting their opinions based on the users who contributed more.

The digital divide

Another factor that affects access to the digital public sphere is the digital divide, which refers to how people from less developed countries tend to have less access to information and communications technologies compared to those from more developed countries. For example, the most developed regions of the world, such as North America and Western Europe, have the highest Internet penetration rates at over 80% each, while the least developed countries such as in Africa and South Asia have less than 30% each. On the other hand, the reduced cost and increasing availability of mobile devices such as smartphones throughout less developed regions is helping to reduce this disparity at an exponential rate. In just two years, between 2013 and 2015, the number of Internet users in developing nations has risen by 9%, according to the Pew Research Center. Other research has shown, though, that even within more developed countries like the United States, the digital divide continues to persist between upper and lower socioeconomic classes and between different education levels. Furthermore, scholars like Mark Warschauer argue that it is not just access to technology that matters, but the knowledge of how to put that technology to use in meaningful ways.

Use of Bots and Sock Puppets

Internet bots, or web robots, robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes, and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots. Software can detect and confirm the presence of bots through qualitative coding. An example would be the Bot-a-meter, developed by Indiana University, which evaluates 7 different factors to determine whether or not a request is generated by a bot.
A Sock Puppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an Internet community who is pretending to be another person. The term has come to designate other misleading uses of online identities, such as those created to praise, defend or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, to skew online voting results, or to evade blocks. There is significant evidence to indicate that the Internet Research Agency, a group of professional Russian trolls, created fake accounts on major networking sites and online newspapers, to promote specific Ukrainian, Middle Eastern, and American political issues, even advocating for Trump as early as December 2015.