Should disinformation on social media be regulated, and if so how?

What is disinformation?

The House of Commons Committee on Disinformation reported in February 2019 and the definition on the previous screen is from their report. Disinformation is, objectively viewed by a third party:

• deliberately dishonest

• always harmful.

But they carefully separate ‘disinformation’ from ‘misinformation’, which they define as “inadvertent sharing of false information.” (1:12) and from ‘fake news’.

What is ‘fake news'’?

‘Fake news’ refer to both passing on false news by genuine mistake and, more dangerously, to refusing to acknowledge as true a report that is accurate but which we don’t like or find inconvenient

It is a dangerous term because it encourages the idea that ‘mainstream media’ are corrupt or biased so what they say should be ignored. This encourages a scepticism that, ironically, makes people more vulnerable to propaganda, as they stop reading factual reports from authoritative sources and rely instead on material shared by friends and contacts over social media, with no yardstick by which to measure ‘truth’ or reliability.Disinformation can then be fed into that situation, to exploit it. There is a deliberate movement by some politicians to encourage this distrust:

President Trump says reporters are among "the most dishonest people in the world." Research firm Gallup tells us two out of every three U.S. adults don’t believe the news and that trust in mass media has sunk to an all-time low.(2)

Why people spread disinformation

Disinformation is generated for a number of reason:

- to grab attention and, once a reader has clicked on a story…

- to then promote advertising or products to that user. For example, the Infowars website deliberately spread the lie that a massacre at a US school did not happen. With the attention thus gained, itsold products online. (38, 82)

- to undermine trust in authority for political or social disruption, for example by spreading stories that directly counteract official sources

- to target people with particular political views, with the intention of influencing their voting intention at the time of an election.

Political disinformation

This is disinformation to promote a political agenda. Demonstrably incorrect statements include the claims “that former US President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that Pope Francis endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump”. (3 pp12-13)

The harms of disinformation

In April 2019 the government published a White Paper on Online Harms. Disinformation was one of the problems listed because it “can threaten public safety, undermine national security, fracture community cohesion and reduce trust.” -(4:1.24)

When the internet is deliberately used to spread false or misleading information, it can harm us in many different ways, encouraging us to make decisions that could damage our health, undermining our respect and tolerance for each other and confusing our understanding of what is happening in the wider world. It can also damage our trust in our democratic institutions, including Parliament. (ibid p70)

Why it is hard to spot disinformation

“It is hard to differentiate on social media between content that is true, that is misleading, or that is false, especially when those messages are targeted at an individual level” (1:302). In addition, when a post has been shared thousands of times, people are more likely to assume that it is verified.

Part of the problem lies in the way algorithms work.Algorithms (see definition below if the term is new to you) decide what information an individual receives. They allow for ‘micro-targeting’ directly personal to one user, who constantly provides information, often unknowingly, that allows the process to be refined and thus more effective.Robots then increase some kinds of information and reject others. This creates a kind of ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ in which a user’s prejudices are confirmed and extended and their world narrowed. (See below for definitions of these terms.)

You Tube were criticised for allowing conspiracy theories and false news to attain their top ranking. In response, they altered their alogrithims to control content that “comes close to — but doesn’t quite cross the line” of violating their rules. Such content will not be deleted, but will be harder to find. They have also “developed software to stop conspiracy theories from going viral during breaking news events”(5)

David and Goliath

Large social media firms can be richer and more powerful than national governments (36) and even when they are not, powerful politicians can be complicit with them. In asking whether we should regulate them, we also need to ask whether we can.

Definition of key terms

Algorithm. An algorithm is a set of instructions telling a computer how to organize a body of data—in this case, how to choose one type of content and reject another. A user interface algorithm then determines how content is arranged on the screen.”(3 p17)

The user will make choices and show preferences and the computer, using algorithms, will use those to refine the process and only show what is likely to be wanted.

This can lead to a “filter bubble “ where the algorithm uses someone’s search history and preferences to deduce what they would like to see and leave out anything they would not. This apparently innocent service tells the user what exists and what is important (top of the search list or most often shared with you) and effectively isolates them from society by surrounding them with only a very selective view, feeding a narrow world view and never allowing in anything that would disagree with it. As users do not know what choices are being made for them, they do not know how they are being manipulated.

A related term is echo chamber, describing how, because of algorithms, your own views are fed back to you and amplified and you rarely see opinions that are different or opposite to yours. This interacts with the human tendency toward confirmation bias , where weto seek out or analyse information in ways that will confirm what we already believe.

Bots is a term based on “robot”,referring to an autonomous programme on a network which can interact with systems or users, often via social media accounts or profiles that purport to be real people but are just machines that send 1000s of posts.They can

have a major influence on opinion and behaviour without the user being aware of it. This could be short term, during an election, or long term, altering a general mood or atmosphere.Bots are able to decide who to send them to for the best effect, using information about users gleaned by algorithms.

Normally, we would know who sent messages. An IP address (Internet Protocol Address) is a unique series of numbers that will identify the computer, tablet or smart phonefrom which information was sent.A server is usually a computer with a large capacity that provides material to a computer network. Once you know the server or source, you know who provided the information. But a proxy server acts as an intermediary, disguising the original source, so material that appears to come from the UK could come from somewhere else.

A sock puppet twitter account is an account apparently in one name but actually operated by someone else. It might be a man pretending to be a young boy or girl, or a politician pretending to speak for their opponent.

As an individual, to ‘troll’ on social media is to make inflammatory comments, designed to create an emotional response. A troll farm is an organisation doing this on a larger scale, for example the Russian Internet Research Agency. (41)

Sources