25 SOCIAL MEDIA Fighting Disinformation
or years now, the media industry has looked with envy at the social media giants, but what once seemed a licence to print money
and ‘disinformation,’” says Puttnam in the UK report’s foreward. “If allowed to flourish, these counterfeit truths will result in the collapse of public trust, and without trust, democracy as we know it will simply decline into irrelevance. In the digital world, our belief in what we see, hear and read is being distorted to the point at which we no longer know who or what to trust. The prospects for building a harmonious and sustainable society on that basis are, to all intents and purposes, non-existent.” This problem is not new. In 2016, the UK referendum and US presidential election highlighted how vulnerable the online information space is to manipulation, but Lord Puttnam hasn’t seen action commensurate with the gravity of the problem. “We’ve been remarkably toothless,” Puttnam, accompanied by committee member and Paralympian gold medallist Lord Chris Holmes, tells FEED and other publications in a briefing. “I’d even go so far as to say that governments have been nervous about tackling this issue for 20 years. When I first talked to Jeremy Wright [former UK secretary for culture, media and sport] almost three years ago, he was passionate about it, but somehow that passion has evaporated.” Both the UK Conservative and Labour parties declined to give in-person evidence to the select committee. The Liberal Democrats did send a representative. Given that the same tools used for disinformation are also used by political campaigns, often in a race to the bottom, this shouldn’t be surprising. “We were very, very disappointed by the unwillingness of the two main political parties to engage with this. They didn’t turn up for their oral evidence, and some of the evidence they gave us in writing proved to be questionable. And this points to parties wanting an edge – ie. they have to skate along what’s legal, and sometimes cross it, in order to be effective,” says Puttnam. The committee’s report makes 45 recommendations, chief among them that
is becoming a toxic battleground being used for disinformation and bullying on an industrial scale. Investigations into the Leave.EU campaign and its partnership with Cambridge Analytica have shown that Facebook was a critical tool in swaying voters in the run-up to the UK referendum to leave the European Union. And evidence from the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that one third of all Twitter traffic just prior to the EU referendum was actually produced by bots, not humans. Disinformation disseminated on Facebook-owned WhatsApp was implicated in disproportionately boosting Jair Bolsonaro prior to his election in Brazil. Messages that included doctored photos and fake ‘fact checks’ were widely spread in a country where mobile devices are the main portal for information. Brazil’s highest court has since established an advisory board on internet and elections to investigate disinformation. The coronavirus pandemic has proved fertile ground for the planting of rumours and the spread of disinformation. The European Commission has devoted a page on its website to addressing widely circulating disinformation about the virus. The page alerts citizens to common coronavirus falsehoods, including that ingesting disinfectants can treat the virus, that the pandemic is a deliberate act of biological warfare, and that Covid-19 has been caused by 5G technologies. On the face of it, a society interconnected by instant communications technology should be in a stronger position to share information to solve common problems, but – at least in their present configuration – the opposite seems to be true. Our ‘social’ media seems to excel at undermining society. RESURRECTING TRUST Last summer, the UK’s House of Lords formed a Democracy and Digital Technologies select committee, chaired by Lord David Puttnam, legendary British film producer and a dogged campaigner for a media space that benefits citizens. The committee has just published its report, Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust , which makes no bones about framing online disinformation as an emergency. The report advises the UK government to take action “without delay” to ensure tech giants are held responsible for harm done by falsehoods spread on their platforms. “This is a virus that affects all of us in the UK – a pandemic of ‘misinformation’
WE WERE VERY, VERY DISAPPOINTED BY THE
UNWILLINGNESS OF THE TWO MAIN POLITICAL PARTIES TO ENGAGEWITH THIS
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