Fixing the internet in the post-truth age?

[Syt]

https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2020-07/desinformation-peter-pomerantsev-social-media-regulation-democracy

The Internet is Broken, We Need a New One

The idea that more free speech also fosters more democracy has failed because of social media. Regulating them can help, but what we really need is radical transparency.

An Essay by Peter Pomerantsev

Freedom of expression; pluralism; holding truth to power; a common respect for the virtues of accuracy and objectivity; the belief that, in a marketplace of ideas, the best information eventually rises to the top: These were the foundational ideas that used to define a democratic information space, and they stand in stark contrast to the dictatorial model, with its censorship and secret police. They were ideals I imbibed growing up: My parents were Soviet dissidents arrested by the KGB in 1978 for distributing censored literature, like Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, that told the truth about the Soviet system of penal colonies. At night, they would listen to banned Western radio stations through the fog of Soviet jamming, desperate for more information – for the heteroglossia of opinion that was a sign of true democracy.

But today, those formulas have been turned upside down. Freedom of expression is used as an excuse to flood people with so much digitally powered disinformation that it has become impossible to tell truth from lies, and it's far from clear whether the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor holds true any longer, or whether accurate information will rise to the top. We have seen pluralism tip into polarisation so extreme, and partisan groups living in realities so different, that it has become impossible to agree on a common set of facts, making democratic debate impossible. We are seeing a whole generation of politicians who no longer seem to be frightened of the truth and who are happy to throw up a big middle finger to factual discourse. And these trends are as prevalent in democracies as they are in dictatorships, blurring the line between the two.

So, what went wrong? How can we fashion a democratic information space for the future? One that guarantees a full, free and fair debate? One where democracies can make decisions based on evidence-based deliberation?

Consider the Philippines. As my parents were enjoying the pleasures of the KGB in the 1970s, the Philippines was ruled by Colonel Ferdinand Marcos, a U.S.-backed military dictator, who used the army to impose censorship and to indulge in horrific forms of torture, leaving victims' skulls stuffed with their underpants by the side of the road, so as better to intimidate passers-by. The Marcos regime fell in 1986, when millions poured out into the streets to demand an end to censorship and torture. Today, the Philippines has some of the highest use of social media in the world. Twentieth century-style censorship would be nearly impossible to impose here. But the new president, Rodrigo Duterte, is not only rehabilitating Marcos' reputation, he has also found new ways of inflicting old oppression.

Glenda Gloria, an editor at the independent news website Rappler, remembers the Marcos years. In the 1980s, she was a student journalist covering the regime's torture of opposition figures. Her boyfriend was arrested for running a small independent printing press and had electrodes attached to his genitals.

"The psychological warfare that Marcos mastered is very similar to what is happening now," Glenda told me. "The difference is, Duterte doesn't have to use the military to attack the media. How is it made possible? With technology."

Rappler, who dared to criticize the president's extrajudicial killings in his war on drugs, has become a target of pro-government cyber militias and online mobs. At one point, there were 90 messages an hour: claims that Rappler was making up the deaths; that it was in the pay of Duterte's enemies; that it was all "fake news". The messages were like an infestation of insects, swarming into email in-boxes and descending like a scourge onto the site's community pages. Rappler journalists were shouted at in the malls: "Hey, you – you're fake news! Shame on you!" Hashtags calling for the arrest of Rappler's editor-in-chief, Maria Ressa, began to trend.

Far from being organic, the attacks were coordinated and included all kinds of fake accounts and bots designed to repeat the same messages over and over. Proving who was behind them, however, was impossible, and this allowed the government to claim it had nothing to do with these campaigns, that these were just concerned citizens expressing their freedom of speech. And isn't freedom of speech what journalists and dissidents have always fought for?

It's a tactic that has been repeated around the world. Campaigns can be incited by pro-government online rabble rousers, as in Turkey, or run through troll farms owned by tycoons loyal to the Kremlin, as in Russia. The Russian troll farms are also well known for launching campaigns abroad, most notably in Germany and America, and now are being joined by Chinese, Iranian and Saudi info-ops. Democracies aren't innocent either. PR firms that operate in democratic countries openly advertise their ability to create social media avatars for their clients, to "astroturf" their messaging and drown out others.

"Speech itself is used as a censorious weapon," says Columbia law professor Tim Wu in describing the situation. It is a method for drowning out critics for which –  unlike with censorship –  we have no legal recourse or, indeed, philosophical premises. Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the article that guarantees freedom of expression and that dissidents like my parents would have pointed to as their defence against the KGB –  says nothing at all about "disinformation". It is not a legal category as such. When the Putins, Trumps and Dutertes of this world say that taking down posts by their online cyber militias is censorship, they are technically correct, however cynical their statements are.

But it's not just the belief that more information automatically leads to better democracy that has been undermined by the digital era. Something more insidious is going on. And it affects the very concept of what it means to be a free person.

Back in 1978, as my father was being interrogated by the KGB, the conversation would often turn to literature. The KGB would chide him for his love of modernist authors, who, instead of writing in the impersonal, officious language of Soviet socialist realism, explored their individual impressions of life.

"Is there any joy greater than writing in the first person?" my father wrote  in a novella published the year of his interrogations. "I feel any good book which acknowledges the human being, individuality, uniqueness is also anti-Soviet, because the state dictatorship is directed against the human being as an individual."

In the 20th century, our idea of a free individual was someone who listened to free-form jazz and liberating rock 'n' roll, and it was that emancipatory energy that regimes suppressed. Today, social media puts absolutely no constraints on self-expression. Each of us can be a modernist author on our Facebook feed. But this self-expression is then transmuted into data. The language we use, our likes and shares, are all passed to data brokers and then on to advertisers and spin doctors, who target us with specially tailored campaigns we might not even be aware of. The more we express ourselves, the less power we have. The connection between emancipation and self-expression has been undermined.

This has produced a propaganda model that is very different from the one we saw in the 20th century. Instead of stuffing a single ideology down people's throats via TV and radio, a spin doctor has to tailor different messages to different social media groups. A country of 20 million, the chatty digital director of Vote Leave, Thomas Borwick, told me, needs 70 to 80 types of targeted messages.

In the case of the vote to leave the European Union, Borwick, who seems to approach such challenges like a Rubik's Cube, claimed that the most successful message in getting people out to vote had focused on animal rights. Vote Leave argued that the EU was cruel to animals because, for example, it supported farmers in Spain who raise bulls for bullfighting. And within the animal rights segment, Borwick could focus even tighter, sending graphic ads featuring mutilated animals to one type of voter and more gentle ads, with pictures of cuddly sheep, to others.

I've heard of similarly varied messaging used by spin doctors across the world. The aim of such propaganda is not to win an argument in a neutral public sphere with objective facts and evidence, but to reinforce the biases of your target audience and to inflame them by conjuring an abstract enemy, "the establishment" or "the elites", that are holding them back. The emotional logic of social media reinforces this process. We go online looking for the narcissistic boost of shares and retweets that signal our tribe and identity. It really doesn't matter if stories come from dodgy sources. After all, you're not looking to win an argument in a public space before a neutral audience, you just want to get the most attention possible from like-minded people.

Indeed, the more extreme the position you take, the better. "Online dynamics induce distortion," argues Walter Quattrociocchi of the University of Venice. In a study entitled "Trends of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation", Quattrociocchi analysed 54 million comments over a four-year period in various Facebook groups and found that the "cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarization". Fake news is not merely the cause of the denigration of democratic debate, it's a symptom of the nature of our new media landscape. Social media is a mini narcissism machine where deliberative debate is not prioritised. Polarisation and fracture, of course, were already flourishing in places like the United States, with partisan cable news networks and talk radio, but online dynamics hyper-charged it. It's no coincidence that the digital age has fostered the creation of a kind of parallel universe in Germany, where a whole chunk of the country dwells in a swamp of "alternative facts".

In this environment, it becomes easier and easier for the powerful to simply dismiss any facts that don't suit them and to replace truth with tribal loyalty. "Objectivity is a myth imposed upon us," says Putin's favourite current affairs TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev, head of the Russian state news agency, as he dismisses all criticism of Putin as the product of an "information war" waged by Russia's enemies. The same argument is made by Trump's attack dogs in the American media – people like Sean Hannity of Fox News, for example, who argues that all "objective" criticism of Trump is just a conspiracy by the "alt-left, destroy-Trump media". Similar arguments are repeated by digitally charged populists and extremists throughout the world. All that matters in this environment is your political identity, which is protected by tall fences of conspiracy theories dividing "us" from "them".

So what can we do about this?

There is, I believe, a role to be played by regulating the online space. But it can't be the same model of regulation that applies to old media. One can try to impose standards of accuracy on media with newsrooms and editors, but trying to regulate every comment made by an ordinary person online is both impossible and probably illegal. As mentioned above, it violates Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sadly, this is a path some democracies are taking, creating new categories of what a UK government proposal calls "legal but harmful" content, which includes "disinformation". There is a case to be made for regulating comments that cause harm to public health, such as unsafe fake cures for COVID-19, but when it comes to political speech, we are on dangerous ground. And, of course, authoritarian regimes such as those in Hungary and Russia are always happy to impose fake news laws to stamp out any criticism.

We need to rethink regulation in the digital age, where the real innovation is not the existence of disinformation, which is nothing new, but the way it can easily be targeted and distributed, often without people understanding how this is done. While my parents struggled to obtain information in the USSR, we face a different type of censorship today. We are surrounded by noise but have little idea about how the information environment is shaped.
We need a radically more transparent internet. We need to have the right to know whether an online account is a bot or a genuine person, whether content is organic or amplified by trolls. We need to know who is behind a "news" site. Anonymity for individuals is fine, and often necessary for safety, but the sort of mass, coordinated, inauthentic activity pushed by troll farms should be made illegal. We need to think of disinformation not primarily as content, but as disinforming types of behaviour. Indeed, the content troll farms can put out is often information neutral and simply supports something emotionally. The disinforming aspect is the deceptive behaviour – and that can be regulated. 

Moreover, we need to know why computer algorithms show us one piece of content and not another – why a particular ad, article, message or image is being targeted specifically at me and not you. We need to know which of our own data has been used to try and influence us and why. Maybe then we would become less like creatures acted upon by mysterious and invisible powers, made to fear and tremble for reasons we cannot fathom. Instead, we would be able to engage with the information forces around us as equals. We need to open up the kitchen where information on the internet is produced, like in a restaurant where you can see the chef at work through a pane of glass. A regulation founded on transparency would still be steeped in the principles of freedom of expression and the right to receive information, but it would update them for a new world.

Such transparency would, of course, not stop people from choosing to follow whatever information they like, but it would help level the playing field, so that those of us who want to save deliberative democracy can start to compete with the forces that seek to sow mistrust and extreme polarisation. It would provide an opportunity for a new type of media, whose mission would be that of building the public sphere of the future.

A lot of sociological research suggests that beneath identity politics, there are many commonalities to work with. Studies by Kings College in the UK and RAND in the U.S., for example, show that while both countries suffer from extreme levels of emotional polarisation and tribal division, when it comes to specific issues, most people are far closer to each other. In Ukraine, where my research initiative through the London School of Economics has involved conducting polling and creating media with local journalists, we've found that beneath the identity politics of pro-Russian and pro-Western groups, there are many common issues both sides want to engage with and deliberate.

But what exactly do I mean by "deliberation" and "engagement"? If factuality has been jettisoned from public discourse, how are people supposed to hold a conversation? Though it's tempting to blame tech for everything, the cultural malaise that has led to our post-truth moment goes much deeper, and it has its roots in historical changes. In the Cold War, both sides, Communism and Democratic Capitalism, saw themselves as trying to establish the better version of a rational idea of the future. They were both projects that claimed to be based in Enlightenment values. Even when the Soviets lied, they still pretended to adhere to language of facts. After all, Communism was meant to be a scientific version of history!
What has changed in the decades since is that all the ideas of the future have disappeared. First Communism collapsed. Then the idea that democratic capitalism was the path to universal prosperity was undermined for many by the crisis of 2008, while the idea that history was inevitably moving towards ever more democracy was destroyed by the failure of democratic change in the Middle East and beyond. And if there is no future left, if all the evidence and facts tell you that your children will be worse off than you, then why would you base political discourse on the facts? It is much better to bathe in anger and nostalgia. And nostalgia is, of course, the theme that the Dutertes, Putins, Trumps, Bolsonaros, Orbans and AFDs of this world all have in common.

In political discourse, the facts only become necessary when we are able to have a conversation about a practical future. There are, after all, no post-fact conversations when we talk about how to build a bridge, for example. Ultimately, only a redesign of the internet as we know it will help. Facebook may be wonderful for sharing family pictures, but is it really the place we want to have our political conversation? Can we envisage a real social, or public service internet designed to encourage people to engage around a common future?

Peter Pomerantsev is a member of the Transatlantic Working Group at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center and co-authored a recently published study of the group on the very subject of this essay: "Freedom and Accountability: A Transatlantic Framework for Moderating Speech Online".

Long commentary. While I agree with his description of the current situation, I don't think more transparency about from where and whom news come will make much of a difference. IMHO there's many, many people who don't care about the source of information as long as it fits their preconceived notions.

I don't know the magic bullet to solve this. Better education and especially in media competence is one part, though that needs time to become effective. Rules against false information sound good on paper, but, as the author states, are open to abuse by people in power who determine what is or isn't truth.

[Josquius]

I think time is fixing it in the west at least.
The major part of the problem lies with late adopter boomers. They've figured out how to use technology but have not properly grasped that they can't believe everything they read.
With digital natives a healthy distrust of the Internet is built in from the start.
The problem is that in the mean time a lot of damage is being done.  We can't afford to just write off a generation. But no idea on the solution.

Of course as the article says it's a much bigger problem outside of the west too. In regions of poor education there's some truly shocking bollocks gets spread. As technology develops and it can be made even more local, hitting the whole of Africa....
As I've said before it does increasingly seem China had the right idea with its demand of real ID for social media.

As a wacky completely off the top of my head idea to try and fix things - what if the governments
online petitions site had social media functionality.

[Tamas]

If Trump have lost (a close call) or if Remain won (an even closer call) none of these "is democracy dead?" articles would have been born.

[Syt]

If Trump have lost (a close call) or if Remain won (an even closer call) none of these "is democracy dead?" articles would have been born.

If they had lost it might have been seen as the victory of facts/truth over alternate reality bubbles. But they didn't, so it wasn't, and here we are with significant parts of the electorate choosing make belief over facts, making discourse highly polarized, emotional and pretty much impossible in their all or nothing mentality.

[The Brain]

Many people have always preferred to live in a fantasy rather than in the real world, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Whether it's a fantasy where Jews control everything, Communism works if we just give it one more try, God exists, nuclear power is a threat to the environment, OUR Balkan country is the good guys, or what have you. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

What makes me a bit sad is that many organizations that should provide some leadership are unwilling or unable to do so. I don't see that changing anytime soon either.

What the writer says about targeted stories/ads etc works both ways. If you think you have an important message (like "reason" or "facts"), it has never been as easy as now to reach people using tailored messages they are receptive to. Complaining about today's effective tools seems weird to me, if they are so great then use them yourself FFS and stop whining.

[Tamas]

There are probably indeed challenges with social media etc. but that does not mean that democracy faces challenges. I would argue that democracy is proving its worth. The ugly shit would spread the same even if a Putinesque leader would kindly rid us of democracy and enact a firm control on what can and can't be talked about. But there would be no outlet for these non-approved beliefs, no way to power or recognition other than violence. With the democracy there is one.

And the kind of influence -as The Brain pointed out- attributed to social media has always existed. But technology limited who had efficient access to it. The Catholic Church faced the same issue with the printing press. Of course that doesn't mean there are no issues or challenges to it and that it cannot be used for evil purposes.

Once again to echo the Nuclear Hermit of Sweden, in a lot of cases social media and the Internet are not creating bubbles, but revealing them.

Finally, the recent protests following the death of Floyd and the subsequent many recordings and sharing of police brutality should highlight a massive advantage of this technology. Absolutely none of those things would have ever become public knowledge if it wasn't for the technology this guy and many others want to rally against. The lack of the technology that enables sharing the opinions he dislikes would have served to strengthen those ideas in those cases - without it, the Floyd case would have been the myriad of other cases of police murder of black people where there are some limited local protests, while the vast majority ignores it based on the official reporting of some troublesome black hoodlum resisting arrest.

[mongers]

Time was grammar nazis were one of the more unpleasant aspects of the internet.

[Berkut]

That is a very good article.

I don't know if more transparency will solve the problem.

What I do know is that more transparency if valuable in and of itself for a variety of reasons, so trying it seems like a pretty damn good idea, and potential first step.

[Berkut]

If Trump have lost (a close call) or if Remain won (an even closer call) none of these "is democracy dead?" articles would have been born.

Bullshit. A thousand times bullshit.

Trump is not the fucking problem, he is a symptom of the problem. His losing would not have made the problem go away.

Hell, we might have actually gotten lucky that such an odious, stupid, and generally horribly incompetent human being got himself elected and forced the problem into our faces.

Putin is another symptom of this problem, and thank the gods that piece of shit didn't get elected in America, with Trump getting elected in Russia.

Can you imagine what a true nightmare that would be?

[Eddie Teach]

He'd have only had 8 years.

[Josquius]

If Trump have lost (a close call) or if Remain won (an even closer call) none of these "is democracy dead?" articles would have been born.

To some extent perhaps. But then its natural you examine problems a lot more when they're happening in your country rather than in a relatively minor country far away. Plus the factor that it is afflicting what would traditionally be regarded as the two main homes of democracy... Makes it all the more worrying than when it happens in e.g. the Philipines

[Tamas]

I am not saying the Internet hasn't made it easier to spread information including false ones, but just to grab the most obvious example of who knows how many, we are 87 years after the Nazis won a bloody election. Are we really going to pretend that blatant lies and fearmongering is a completely new tool in democratic elections? Really?

[DGuller]

What the writer says about targeted stories/ads etc works both ways. If you think you have an important message (like "reason" or "facts"), it has never been as easy as now to reach people using tailored messages they are receptive to. Complaining about today's effective tools seems weird to me, if they are so great then use them yourself FFS and stop whining.

I think you're assuming that social media made all kinds of communication more effective equally.  I think it made malignant communication disproportionately more effective.  It's much easier to shut people's brains off at 140 characters a pop than it is to turn them on.

[The Brain]

What the writer says about targeted stories/ads etc works both ways. If you think you have an important message (like "reason" or "facts"), it has never been as easy as now to reach people using tailored messages they are receptive to. Complaining about today's effective tools seems weird to me, if they are so great then use them yourself FFS and stop whining.

I think you're assuming that social media made all kinds of communication more effective equally.  I think it made malignant communication disproportionately more effective.  It's much easier to shut people's brains off at 140 characters a pop than it is to turn them on.

I am not convinced that social media makes malignant communication more effective than other communication, but I'm certainly open to evidence. With an attitude that it favors malignant communication my impression is that chances to use it for good get worse.