Social Media and The Public Sphere in Jordan in Relation to Political Decisions on Corruption
“A Case Study of Jordanian Political Elites”.
Literature Review
The present study will discuss the political system of Jordan that has long remained in the hands of the elites. Families with strong backgrounds have always ruled over the country in the past. Social media has proven to be one platform that activists have been using effectively and efficiently to engage people and organize protests in Jordan. Facebook and Twitter were not used in the country for promotions or social networking; rather they are used to connect with people and promote different viewpoints. It has provided the citizens with an opportunity to take part in the counter-public sphere. However, these citizen journalists have caused the government to pass certain laws to control this new concept of “technology for freedom.” This is why the Jordan media is being strictly controlled by the state. Such laws are harming democracy as ‘freedom of speech’ and the ‘right to know’ are two vital parts of a democratic state. Human rights, the fight against corruption, democracy and development are some factors that are quite interlinked.
The following points will be discussed in this literature review.
- The nature of the Jordanian political system:
- The developments in parliamentary work in Jordan:
- Relationship between elites and authority
- Constitutional Reforms in Jordan
- Integrity and anti-corruption commission
- The concept of public sphere and the importance of its study in our societies:
- The emergence and initial indications of the concept of public sphere:
- Public sphere and public opinion
- Public sphere, democracy and social media
The nature of the Jordanian political system:
Officially, the state of Jordan is a constitutional monarchy which practices democracy. The constitution of Jordan respects human rights and academic and media freedoms and is governed by the rule of law. However, in reality, the situation is very different. The King has great powers thanks to the constitution. The immense power to the king is stipulated by Article 30 which states that King is the state head and is immune to any responsibility and liability. The high-sounding safeguards of the high political elite makes the liberties of people comes second place to the law which is often proposed and implemented by the government elite headed by the King. The key attributes of democracy only play marginal roles in the nation’s life. The media is free only to a restricted level, and the vague laws ban all criticism on the king and its policies on national issues and foreign relations. However, it is not the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or Assad’s Syria. Even though the securities are feared, but it is not largely used to terrorize. Within the limitations, the media is live, diverse, and debates aggressively (Fanack 2009).
The Jordon media environment is comparatively diverse and is very pluralist. The reporters, however, often cannot show professionalism and have biases and affiliations with employers. The fear of legal consequences and physical threats also plays a role in the reporting. The reporters are well aware of the red lines that are not to be crossed, and these red lines are mostly related to monarchy, ethnic and religious issues. The country is ranked 128th in the Press Freedom Index in 179 countries ranked in Reporters without Borders (UNESCO 2019).
Press media, here, can play an important role in the economic and social development of the country. It should be looked upon as an opportunity rather than a challenge for the government.
The developments in parliamentary work in Jordan:
Parliament is the National Assembly which is comprised of an upper house and an elected lower house. The parliament in the Jordan is often marginalized by the monarchy as shown by the numerous occasions in which the monarch suspended it and has postponed the elections. The 1989 elections were the first elections in the last 22 years which saw a 70 percent turnaround and were also considered as widely fair and free elections. The opposition party won almost half of the seats. The parliament emerged from this election was by far the livelier and was involved in debating matters tabooed in previous governments. The parliamentary system has by far remained under the East Bankers and the electoral system is engineered always to favor them. The trend of dissolving parliaments and postponing elections has not long gone. Even with the amendments in the electoral laws the elections in 2013 favored the loyalists of the regime again (Fanack 2009).
Relationship between elites and authority
The Jordanian political environment enables the relationship between the elites and the authority to remain strong. The nature of the political system of the Jordan with all the strong family ties, tribal backgrounds, and weak, unorganized political parties and very unstable regional environment provides room for the elites to gain more authority. The constitutional amendments which concentrated the powers of the King have come across without any meaningful debate in parliament, or with any substantial public engagement despite its enormous implications on the government system. This is one example of showing how elites have all the authority in the political system of Jordan (Huneidi 2014).
Constitutional Reforms in Jordan
The Jordanian Parliament made two amendments in 2014 to its constitution which was both approved by the majority. The first one expanded the IEC jurisdiction to have the administration of the municipal and all other elections assigned to it by the government. The second of the amendments have given the King yet another power to appoint, accept or dismiss the resignation of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also that of the GID Director. The public has overall welcomed the expansion of the exposure of the IEC and its mandate and believes that it would increase its credibility. The hopes are rising that it would reduce the chances of electoral frauds and the government would be able to provide wider decentralization for better services delivery at the local municipal levels (Obeidat 2016). The second amendment further concentrates power in the hands of the King who is not legally or politically accountable. Criticizers are considering this amendment as one of the steps towards the absolute monarchy.
Integrity and anti-corruption commission
According to Zhu, Lu, and Shi (2013), one workaround that totalitarian governments have over informal information sources such as gossip is through systematic propaganda and reduced access to media. An ideal democracy is a system of government that combines constitutional rule with the assent of the people with freedom of expression and other positive aspects of society. This includes positive economic policies that begin with accountability and transparency of any economic aspects of the country. Societies that switch from being autocratic or totalitarian to democracy will not necessarily see a drop in corruption and public wastage and in many cases may even experience an escalation.
In a study of the links between corruption and social media, Jha and Sarangi (2017) found that among countries with low media freedom, there is a direct relationship between internet penetration and corruption. The 150-country analysis found that whenever press freedoms are restricted, social media fills the gap as the complement to free media (Jha and Sarangi, does social media reduce corruption? 2017). A free press provides a counterbalance to corruption (Brunetti and Wede 2003). The more totalitarian the regime is and the more control it exerts on the mass media, the more likely it is that people will get their information from the grapevine in the form of rumors, gossip, and other informal channels (Zhu, Lu and Shi 2013). A study by Enikolopov, Petrova, and Sonin (2018) found that social media plays a vital role in promoting accountability in Russia. Traditional media in Russia is heavily censored, and a large proportion of the biggest players are state-owned. This left the work of exposing corporate malfeasance and corruption in state-owned and state-controlled companies at the hands of bloggers and social media users. The study by Zhu, Lu, and Shi (2013 combined data from major Chinese newspapers as well as local dailies and semi-commercial publications. This wide array of data sources proved that people’s perceptions of corruption are influenced by multiple sources both formal and informal. Enikolopov, Petrova, and Sonin (2018) study examined not just the impact of blog posts on the market returns of the companies, but also the timing of the posts and their reactions. The study found a direct relationship between the posts and the negative effects on the company, often leading to management turnover and reduced shareholder conflicts.
Anti-corruption units such as non-profit organizations also use social media to engage the public in issues of corruption, governance, and accountability (Hou and Lampe 2015). There are now two broad classes of information on public matters available online: projects targeting citizens in general and those that target individual citizens with an understanding of public processes such as budgeting, procurement, and legislation. In between these classes are journalists, content creators, activists, and others both in new and traditional media who work to simplify complex information for the general public.
In anti-corruption specifically, social media provides an environment for analysis and commentary. It also provides an environment for investigation, especially through crowdsourcing. In many countries, there are now anti-corruption-related websites that give the general public the chance to report corruption without repercussions and give analysts and advocacy expert’s crucial data on the extent of corruption in those societies. These opportunities have often been utilized to different ends, as the structure of social media platforms does not necessarily carry the same outright legitimacy as traditional media. The onus then falls on governments and criminal justice systems to investigate the issues, in the same way that Habermas (2006) envisions public spheres influencing the actions of the state. This layering of information presents risks of personal vendettas and misinformation, but different scholars have found social media an effective tool in bringing key public issues to the government’s attention.
For governments to process the kind of discourse that happens in online spaces, they must first inhabit them. The most common way is driven by the opportunities of the Digital Age in making governance easier and more approachable. The concept of e-government essentially seeks to use online tools to communicate with and offer services to citizens. It is hampered by a myriad of factors including low investment in public communication as well as low levels of trust in government (Darwish 2017). According to Graham (2014), social media is used by governments to promote transparency, democracy, and participatory politics. Although most governments now have an active online presence, most still struggle with the two-way channel format of the space. Governments still primarily use traditional media for official and formal communication, often relying on social media only as a complementary space. Despite the opportunity offered by the structure and being of social media for governments to give and receive feedback as a crucial step towards decision-making, most governments tend to view social media as largely an informal space (Darwish 2017).
In a network analysis study of 100 UAE government online accounts, Darwish (2017) found that while online presence has allowed governments to take up an active communication role, there are still gaps especially in engagement, participation, and transparency. Btoush (2014) found that the Jordanian government was not utilizing social media and online tools despite the opportunities presented to use a less costly, more effective method of communicating with more stakeholders. Use of the digital spaces to offer services and communicate with the public has a lasting effect not only on the costs but also on transparency and the quality of the services.
Governments and politicians the world over have deployed social media communication as part of political electioneering and campaigning (Edgerly, et al. 2009). The active use of different platforms as campaign tools has now made social media a veritable campaign battleground. This development has been due to the same advantages that drive the use of social media for other functions such as official government communication. Politicians and pundits can actively engage with different audiences across the electoral regions without having to organize as many face-to-face appearances as possible and other physical engagements. During the last presidential elections in the United States, the wide gap between poll results and the actual election led to a concerted effort to analyze how the polls had missed dissident voices.
The effect of social media in areas such as electoral politics has also exposed the significance and magnitude of the phenomenon of fake news. Although not a new thing, the proliferation of fake news online as a large-scale threat to public communication has forced many governments and individuals to rethink how they use the online space. A complication of this has been how different social media services curate what their users see, with algorithms modifying these experiences depending on a myriad of factors. In 2017, for example, it became clear that Facebook had not done anything to stem the manipulation of its algorithm by Cambridge Analytica. Such misuse of privacy and personal data is now a global concern and affects the trust element of social media.
Another area of public communication is crisis communications. During emergencies, governments need to communicate efficiently and effectively with citizens, especially in the affected areas. The challenges that this process faces include the likelihood that some emergencies might cut off internet access, making it harder to reach the intended audiences. However, different governments have effectively used different social media and online tools to guide evacuation, emergency relief services, and on-time communication. For audiences outside the emergency zones, such situations often trigger concerted fund-raising efforts as well as volunteers to assist in emergency relief. In some countries, police departments use social media to fight crime, disseminate critical information and seek assistance from the public.
All these uses of social media in general point towards a spirited shift globally to find ways to use the online space to make public communication more effective. One major challenge for public communicators is how and where to deploy such communication strategies. Research shows that while Twitter is mostly used for updates and direct communication, Instagram is used for less formal engagement and public campaigns (Gruzd, Lannigan and Quigley 2018). Spaces such as YouTube, on the other hand, offer the opportunity to educate, inform, and engage with citizens on different topics. The challenge is always visibility of public communication, as it competes with multiple topics for attention. Although many social media platforms now have algorithms that give preference to location-specific content, allowing their users to view information about the societies they inhabit, this does not always translate into direct engagement.
The concept of public sphere and the importance of its study in our societies:
The emergence and initial indications of the concept of public sphere:
The media plays a critical role in the political economy of a country. Traditional media has played this role in most democracies, filling the gap between the people and those in power with questions, analysis, and other forms of content that help the public understand government policy and therefore, malfeasance (Brunetti and Wede 2003). Social media exists as what Habermas (2006) termed as a ‘public sphere.’ Public spheres are areas or contexts within a society where people can meet and discuss problems bedeviling them as individuals or as a collective. This space inevitably informs political action as it is essential to informing and gauging public opinion. In Habermas (2006) example of the 18th century, the social sphere was mainly salons and coffee houses where the male bourgeois could meet and discuss different issues. The structure of society at the time meant that the opinions they formed and information they exchanged during such gatherings was a significant contributor to their influence over the state. Even then, the media played an increasingly pivotal role, especially in bringing different public issues into focus and even informing the kind of debate that occurred within other public spheres. The invention of the printing press had increased public consumption of news and opinions, and ultimately boosted public expression and understood of key issues.
Subsequent scholars have suggested that an ideal situation would be where government and political action is guided by the public sphere (Altbach 2015, Fraser 1992, White 1997). In Habermas (2006) concept, the media provides the best way of transmitting the public discourse that happens within the public sphere to the body politic, and vice versa. Others who play this role include lobbyists, moral entrepreneurs, public intellectuals, and advocates. In Habermas (2006) definition, the public sphere has to be autonomous from the state and other forces such as economic might (White 1997). According to Fraser (1992), it is also dependent, in an ideal setting at least, on the idea that the discourse within such spaces would be rational and critical, and would not just permit, but also encourage critical reflecting. Other requirements for the ideal public sphere include role-taking, sincerity, and inclusion.
While the internet is a vast enterprise, social media emerged as a quasi-public sphere. The difference with traditional media is that public discourse of critical issues is intercepted with other forms of social discussion. Even more importantly, the relatively low barriers to entry for individuals to ensure a more inclusive space where different people with varied experiences can contribute to the discussion (Mishaal and Abu-Shanab 2015). Spaces, such as bulletin boards and chat rooms, in the first decades of the internet, were a popular space enhanced discussion, but this has not always been perfect or positive. On a global scale, it is erroneous to believe that the discussions that happen online affect the vast majority of people within a populace. Several scholars have also found a tendency to denigrate diversity in opinion, as well as a generally low level of deliberative merit to how internet users interact with matters of public interest (Altbach 2015). Where Habermas (2006) concept would require inclusion and debate for a public sphere to work, the reality is that a significant number of people instead choose to experience in what scholar’s term as “online echo-chambers.” Such spaces include partisan groups as well as interactions, which work as deliberative spaces but do not meet the standards set by Habermas (2006) definition of a public sphere (Young 1996).
Public sphere and public opinion
The importance of social media in the Arab world became clear at the end of 2010 after Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the injustices he had suffered as a result of unemployment, poverty, and corruption. Although it was just one among several tools that the ensuing protests in Tunisia and other countries, social media became a primary way for protestors to organize, mobilize, and communicate. While several governments collapsed under the weight of the popular protests, others such as Jordan used the time to institute constitutional and political reforms. According to Vendetti (2012) the primary source of news on these reforms, for young Jordanians, was government-affiliated news media. This dependence meant that they most got one-sided or incomplete information that did not improve their knowledge of the reforms themselves and their intended impact. Vendetti’s hypothesis is that this incompleteness of political news is a crucial element of Jordan’s experience in the digital age because it extends the knowledge of how the state keeps essential public knowledge from the public.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that Jordan had an internet penetration rate of 62.3 percent in 2017. This was nearly double the penetration rate five years before, marking a steady rise in both mobile phone and internet penetration rates. Internet services provided Jordanians with an alternative way of accessing the press as early as 2006 when AmmonNews was launched as a news website. This was about a year after the first online radio station, AmmanNet, began broadcasting. Jordan also launched its e-government site in 2006 as a single source for government services. In its original form, it offered government to business, government to government and most importantly, government to citizen services. The government only joined social media, specifically Facebook, in November 2011 with a view to better understanding the people it was serving online (Khasawneh and Abu-Shanab 2013).
Freedom House ranks Jordan as “Partly Free” due to the absence of a free media as well as the frequent blockage of political content, social media websites and freedom of speech online. The media landscape in Jordan is limited by multiple factors including government dominance as well as lack of training and resources among journalists to provide a proper oversight role over the kingdom (Katabi and Khazna 2010). This limits public knowledge of administrative and financial corruption. Between June 2016 and May 2017, for example, prodemocracy activists who primarily used the internet to communicate and disseminate information were arrested and prosecuted. The government also blocked access to several news sites, and a writer was assassinated by an extremist after sharing a controversial cartoon on Facebook. The murder of Nahed Hattar ushered in a new era of fear for internet users as it marked the most direct repercussion of online activity in the physical world.
In Jordan, the digital space has provided a meeting point for activists with a variety of interests. In 2011, for example, activists began the “Save Ajloun Trees” accounts on Facebook and Twitter to advocate against planned deforestation to make way for a military academy. The use of the digital space for environmental issues has since expanded into other sectors such as garbage collection and construction issues. On the political front, the digital space has provided citizens with a rallying point to act as a quasi-opposition as there are no political parties in the country. A local NGO, Leaders of Tomorrow (LoT), encourages young Jordanians to comment on socio-political issues. The conversations are curated under the hashtag #FadFed.
The increasingly political awareness in Jordan is best seen in the period of the Arab Spring. Jordanians went online to advocate for their government to condemn the atrocities in Libya, and also held demonstrations every Friday between January and February 2011 (Sweis and Baslan 2013). Although the protests did not result in the same kind of political change as they did in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, they are clear evidence of the increasingly important role of social media among citizens.
The view of social media as a public sphere is hampered by the fact that it does not meet the minimum standards of Habermas’ public sphere. Although the lack of autonomy from governments and economic influences, as well as lack of inclusivity, are significant, they do not necessarily mean that social media platforms are not essential to how citizens interact with each other and with the state. Some scholars such as White (1997) argue for a redefinition of public spheres in light of the uniqueness of social media to the human experience. This particularly relates to the global nature of audiences, which magnifies some causes and information and can increase pressure on governments to respond to core public issues. Since social media platforms are often not limited to physical borders, they allow citizens to find information specific to their countries even when they are not physically there. This gives them agency as well as the opportunity to contribute to public discourse, and enriches the experiences with which opinions are shared, argued, and accepted or rejected.
A core element of public discourse on corruption is the concept of public shaming. Even in societies where public corruption is rampant, the online space allows citizens to share their rage, opinion, and experiences. Such cases can force governments to institute public reform as social media platforms now form a core source of news for international media. Instead of sending in journalists or having reporters on the ground canvassing for views, many players in the traditional media sector now heavily depend on social media to gauge matters of public interest to cover.
In societies such as Asian countries where public shaming is a useful tool, anti-corruption drives are often covered fervently. The Chinese anti-corruption drive has, for example, received significant national and international attention. Such coverage often affects the perception of the criminal justice system as well as government transparency. Although studies between the two are inconclusive, mass media often tends to be limited by the lack of space to cover issues that reporters and editors do not view as significant. This can lead to a proliferation of small-scale corruption as states and mediators such as media focus on large-scale corruption. One risk for the Chinese experience is that, as the anti-corruption drive has gained legitimacy as a critical topic of the day, it can also erode trust in the government and the political system. Such drives, even when combined with an effective criminal justice system, present a delicate balance in assuring citizens while weeding out corruption.
Proper discourse and coverage of corruption first begin with the identification of the social factors that allow and drive it. Since corruption is a social construct, any efforts to process it at a state or social level raises questions of legitimacy of the governing authority (Graham 2014). The nature of news means that the cases are covered at their legal and economic impact levels before they are processed on a social one. This roundabout experience is dangerous as it can also affect how citizens feel about the societies they inhabit.
Public sphere, democracy and social media
The most significant difference in how social media relates to corruption versus how traditional media does is in that the former provides a two-way channel. The one-way channel of traditional formal media means that it is hard to gauge the public’s reaction to any story in real time, and set standards make it hard for that feedback to alter, influence, or even improve current coverage. Even more important is the fact that social media places the power of creating, disseminating, and reacting to news in the hands of everyone who has a phone and can access the internet. The relatively free flow of information, as well as the borderless nature of most social media, means that more people can communicate on a topic, circulate news, and organize anti-corruption campaigns. For activists, social media provides a way to compare notes and even track cross-country corruption. This kind of openness has placed corruption and public communication, as old as politics itself, in the firing line from voters who previously did not have such access to information (Slaughter 2018).
A major thing that early scholars of the internet as a public sphere such as White (1997) did not account for is the presence and influence of the state on the digital space. The internet, although virtual, relies on laws and other formal structures to exist and thrive. In many places, governments have turned to surveillance and monitoring social media platforms and other online spaces to control public opinion. This form of censorship presents a danger to the public sphere, as it creates an environment of fear where free expression stands the risk of punishment. Censorship can also exist in other ways such as self-censorship as well as indirectly through cultural differences such as language, age, and access. Most societies that take this route to defend it by pointing out that social media has become a space for propaganda, gossip, fake news, and outright gossip. However, this view is limited to a traditional understanding of media as a social being, which social media does not purport to be.
For public communication scholars, the rise in internet penetration has also changed public attitudes towards governments. The choice between fatalism and activism, as reactions to corruption, is now more informed as citizens can actively engage with each other and at times, with individuals and public organizations (Habermas 2006). The freer the press, at least in most cases, the more powerful it is as a voice of the people. In democratic systems, there are mechanisms that make it possible for people and the media to talk about corruption and corruption and expose them to the courts and punish them if they are convicted and to recover the money from them. In corrupt, despotic regimes, power corrupts, because in these systems no one can speak of corruption, especially if corrupt in power, as in most countries.
In the digital age, social media provides a platform for citizens and whistleblowers to expose corruption without having to go through the mediation of the state or traditional media. In many countries, this has presented both established and incidental activists with tools they can deploy to pressure governments to react to specific issues. While this presents an opportunity for governments to respond to corruption on a social level, it also furthers compounds anti-corruption efforts.
In essence, there are multiple factors that determine public discourse on corruption. In the Digital Age, these factors are compounded by both the primacy of social media as a public space, as well as its indirect effect on reducing the power of traditional media. State control and censorship further complicate the nature of public discourse on such platforms, as they are seen as replacements for traditional media which could be easily controlled or at least, influenced (Hou and Lampe 2015). The stark difference is that such media is often run by trained and experienced journalists who understand their role as social and political mediators does not negate the power or influence of social media. Instead of being seen as an alternative to traditional media, social media should be seen as an extension of the public spaces where such news stories and public issues are either openly whispered or quietly whispered.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is apparent that social media as a platform for discussions on corruption provides two-way communication opportunity. Social media provides the power of reacting to discussion or news on corruption in the hands of everyone. This has led the politics and discussion on corruption to get in the line of fire from voters. The traditional media of Jordan as shown by Katabi and Khazna (2010) is limited in terms of several factors. Furthermore, the state is still successful in keeping important information to itself or controlling it as Vendetti (2012) showed that for reforms and constitutional updates, Jordanians rely on the traditional media as their primary source. As per the scholars, this shows how this is another important factor in the Jordanian experience of the digital age. The early scholars like White (1997) did not account for the influence of the state on this public sphere. In terms of public communication scholars, internet penetration has changed the attitudes of the public towards the government. Public awareness has increased with active participation in discussions on corruption. As per Hou and Lampe (2015), the public discourse is further complicated on such open platforms because of the interventions of the state and censor departments. White (1997) has earlier asked for the redefinition of the public sphere for the inclusion of social media. Social media, because of the global nature of the audience, has a very unique nature. Social media is the platform which is also not bound to any physical borders which makes it more unique in terms of discussion on corruption. One important role as shown by Sweis and Baslan (2013) is that the social media advocacy by Jordanians for their government and against Libya shows how social media has an influencing role in the discussion of corruption and politics. Therefore, it is apparent that social media as a public sphere has a significant influence on the discussions over the corruption and politics of the Jordanian environment with certain areas still under control of the state.
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