How social networks modeling can help us understand the inevitable democratic disruption under the impact of Big Tech

Digital spaces are increasingly present and influential in contemporary societies, to the point that what happens online can no longer be ignored when it comes to understanding their evolution. From politics to global warming debates, through vaccination debates, what happens online, and in particular on social networks, has more and more influence on what happens offline.

This virtualization of social interactions brings as many new research questions as it does major challenges for our democracies. On the one hand, we have never had so much data on social systems, which should be conducive to a better conceptual understanding of their dynamics. On the other hand, the acceleration of information, the amplification of disinformation and misinformation phenomena, as well as the multiplication of digital interference between competing countries, give us the impression of a disruption and a weakening of the social fabric, victim of fragmentation and polarization.

We will illustrate these phenomena from the observation of six years of political activism in France within the framework of the Politoscope project, a social macroscope using Twitter data. Then we will analyze what, in a systemic way, can lead to these democratic disruptions and, in order to stop it, the necessary evolutions of the organization of our digital spaces.