A month or so ago in Vancouver, Observer journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Carole Cadwalladr, addressed a considerable Ted Talk crowd and sermonised to the ‘gods of silicon valley’ – the likes of Facebook and Twitter – on their responsibility to further protect their platforms from becoming tools to spread misinformation.
Since breaking the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year, which found that the Vote Leave campaign had used Analytica during the referendum to target social media users with Facebook ads by ‘illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook’ and targeting them through dark ads, Cadwalladr has faced an almost daily vitriolic smear campaign from the likes of Aaron Banks and Andy Wigmore, whom she had reported on – labelling her ‘hysterical, insane, a lunatic, a mad woman’, and a ‘conspirator’.
Poetic justice then, that at almost the exact same time that Carole stood on the TED stage and finally received global acclaim for her investigations, a story broke in the UK, alleging that Pro Brexit group Leave.EU, founded by Aaron Banks, had faked migrant videos and targeted right wing extremists with paid social advertising. One video, debunked and produced by Bank’s Leave.EU, showed ‘European migrants’ attacking women at a subway in ‘Germany’, yet the video was edited from a sexual assault in Cairo in June, 2013. This video became one of the most viewed during the referendum campaign with over one and a half million views on its first post on Facebook alone. Other staged migrant assaults and videos showing attempts to cross the channel were produced and released, also gaining viral status.
Closer regulation around digital campaigning to stop ‘fake news’ is a must and Cadwalladr is right that when it comes to data being manipulated, especially breaches, the onus should be on social media companies to do more to ensure ‘they’re on the right side of history’, but what can Facebook realistically do to ensure that all content uploaded is ‘legitimate’? When it could take 10 years to develop a technical solution for a frictionless Irish border we’re probably quite far off the technology to instantly scan a piece of video for fact-based cracks. The suggestion of an ‘approved sources’ list was thrown around by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the Home Office have made proposals for content sharing platforms in their ‘Online Harms White Paper‘. However, for those less fond of authoritarian methods, there are other solutions.
To me, the real issue here is the inability to empirically evaluate information, and others agree – Ipsos Mori recently reported that three in four British adults think that it should be a criminal offence to spread fake news. Until ‘digital literacy’ is added to the curriculum, you can’t force-educate someone and you can’t prove whether they shared something ‘deliberately’. Since the birth of the internet, and more specifically, social media, society has been overloaded with news from an endless list of sources, except now individuals have the added incentive (and option) to share or manipulate it further.
Those that have grown up in the digital age are certainly more likely to be able to disseminate a piece of online information and work out if what they are being told is actually true or, at least, likely to be true. Even then though, opinion is often printed as fact and hard to decipher without deep investigation and let’s be honest, most people aren’t that interested in finding out. The spread of misinformation, as a political strategy, has been around since Plato donned a toga – it’s just more readily and freely available now.
Educating the digitally literate would definitely solve a lot of the tribalism and extreme views in British politics today but as I said, it can’t be forced on someone and there’s also those you can’t teach – you’re never going to stop Karen from Swindon complaining about too many brown people in her town centre on Facebook.
We could potentially cut out the middle man and easily hold a proverbial gun to the heads of instigators, like The Daily Mail, with laws that already prohibit falsehoods in other areas of life. We have fraud for the attainment of money through deception. We have perjury for perverting the course of justice. Why is lying for political gain excluded? Merely extending these already established legal principles to politics, such as knowingly lying to influence voters, and making it a criminal offence should see change, right? It becomes a matter for the British justice system to decide, in a trial, whether statements made by news outlets or political campaigners were false and whether they knew they were false when they made them (similar legal burden of proof as for perjury and perverting the course of justice). Nonetheless, one person’s lie is another person’s “misunderstanding” – one of the reasons why ‘Libel’ and ‘Slander’ are really hard to prove. Also, filling the courts with cases that try to iron out the fuzziness of reality more than they currently do seems like a black hole, and a potential waste of time and money. There must be another answer? Here’s mine.
What we could do is set up a system of attestations where any public figures or journalists can attest to the facts in a freely available report. The most trusted reports would be those where political opponents attest to the facts presented, but could still maintain their different conclusions. In theory, this could incentivise factual reporting and provide disincentives for hyperbole, creating a spectrum of trust on which reports and individual truthfulness could be rated. Of course, there would be ways to game the system, as there always is but rigorous auditing and good transparency could help minimise those risks. It’s demonstrably better than continuing the mass circulation of unregulated fake news that we suffer through now.
Until something like this is introduced though, the onus is very much on individuals to do their own proofreading. It appears ‘The Truth will set you free’ but only if the “truth” is user friendly..
Matt Adkin 