A majority of this post is in response to this article.
I take issue with the author’s (Alexis Madrigal) framing on this issue. He is pretending that democracy is dead because fake news exists and gets shared without repression and everyone is being fed lies. But there are issues with the foundation of what he would have most people believe would be a problem, along with serious issues with any solution that could be presented to the problem.
No Agreeable Definition Or Solution
First, I take issue with the lack of definitions of key words. Madrigal makes no attempt to even provide an example of what would be construed as misinformation. However, I am familiar with The Atlantic, so I will reference another article for a definition of what “disinformation” is (I understand it is a different author). Here, they claim disinformation is:
- Out of context video clips
- Influencers paid to mock opposing candidates
- Mercenary trolls working out of call centers
- Using bots to screenshot tweets where people admit to tampering with elections
- The use of bots, troll farms, and deepfakes.
- Saying lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense.
This definition of disinformation is clearly too broad and unenforceable to be actionable in any fair way. It’s almost certainly a recipe for totalitarianism, anyone who would want to “crack down” on it would be leaning in on being authoritarian. A solution to stopping these could not be applied without bias or need of vengeance.
Consistent Application Can Backfire
Take the first point, for example, that “out of context video clips” are a form of disinformation. After the 2017 riot in Charlottesville, VA, that left one person dead, President Trump said that “both sides had very fine people.” This clip was taken around and around, every left-leaning media outlet in the world claimed that Trump had moralized Nazism and White Supremacy. But that’s not the full story. In the very same response, Trump literally said the words “I’m not talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Despite that, this quote was used as the context to launch a Presidential Campaign. “Total condemnation” – and a former Vice President thinks that there was any moralization.
And that’s just one of many examples where the definition of disinformation is clearly unstable- it would backfire within seconds. Should Joe Biden get silenced for not appropriately contextualizing Trump’s comments? Should his freedom of speech be curtailed, his social media credit score tanked, and his campaign’s message halted?
If influencers mocking candidates is disinformation, then, for example, the endless onslaught of Late Night TV hosts bashing the right-wing every night for years and years must be disinformation. Should we gag them? What about using bots, troll farms (whatever those are), and deepfakes? As the article points out, the DNC did not approve a measure to ban these as campaigning tools. “Saying nonsense” is disinformation? How is that possibly an immutable standard?
New Panic About An Older Problem
Look, this sounds like a defense of the right-wing. It’s not. It’s pointing out, for the sake of the left-wing’s sanity, that proposed solutions to these issues will certainly backfire.
The problem of Fake News is not new. It’s as old as news itself, “fake news took off at the same time news began to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439.” Democracy itself wouldn’t rise as the preferred mode of governance for another 300 years. Why do we associate the free movement of information with an increased likelihood that some of that information could be wrong? Give the people some credit: Only 8.5% of Facebook users have shared a fake news link even once. That counters the claim from the original article that says “digital illiteracy and the collapse of journalism create an ill-informed public.” Most of the people who share Fake News are older than 65, too. Does that represent 50 years of ill-informed voters voting? Of course not.
Another point to bring up is that edited pictures and videos are beginning to take become more popular as a means to smear somebody. But this tactic is not new either. In fact, a quick Google search brings back documentation of photo tampering happening as far back as the 1860’s. And I’m not saying that the source is right or wrong. I’m only saying that doctored media has been around for a long time, and it wouldn’t be news to tell an average 50-year-old that some images might not be completely real and might be doctored. We should be worried when governments and the ruling class tries to sell fake pictures as real, but when the public does it, my solution would be to have a watchful eye, nothing more. People don’t need more censorship and restrictions on their speech.
Who Has The Power?
Do social media companies have too much power over the state of political discourse? Absolutely, that is undeniable. But the answer is to ask them to do less, not more, to control speech. Another quote I’ll attack is the claim that “Technology empowers the already powerful.” Socially, immigrants and gay people are not the “already powerful.” Yet positive views towards these groups have increased tremendously since the Internet and social media exposed them and gave them a platform instead of repressing them.
Another example is the largely online debate that has revolved around transgender rights and privileges. As a result of this debate being platformed over the last five years, Americans increasingly support them. There was no tyranny of trans people before this debate. Trans people were not already the dominantly powerful social class. This is an unsupportable claim.
If the claim wasn’t referencing social power, but rather economic power, it still doesn’t hold up. The companies that have gained the most from the most from increased technology have been technology companies, certainly not the “already powerful” companies that were ahead before the Internet revolution began. In fact, the top five publicly traded corporations by market cap, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook, are tech companies. So to say that “technology empowers the already powerful” from an economic perspective is kind of intrinsically true in today’s world, but technology didn’t solidify the market leads of General Electric, Wal-Mart, or Citigroup throughout the 2000’s.
What Should Be Done?
Social media companies should do a better job of recognizing fake accounts, bots, and deepfakes. The government should do a better job of giving people protections from data harvesting and data weaponization, a tangential issue mentioned by the article. The US military should help us combat the rise of foreign influence posing as American influence (I believe this is what is meant by “troll farms”): Russia has a tenth of our military budget, but is very effective with using that budget to attack our institutions. Let’s strengthen laws against cyberstalking and doxxing, too. Online speech should be safe and legal.
Free speech is fine. The decentralized force of the public should be given more power over the political speech that is shared and spread, not less. And resorting to fear-mongering techniques about the ruination of democracy is a bit weak. The claim being made is that democracy is dying, so we need social media companies to take more undemocratic control of political discourse.
And that is where I disagree. It’s this exact mentality that pushes people off neutral platforms (fear of being banned or ostracized) and into echo chambers like 4chan. It might work for taming seemingly-neutral online spaces, but maintaining a tame platform is not the goal of political discourse. Changing minds is, this is what leads to change through representation and action. So be sure that when a right-leaning person gets banned from Twitter instead of being engaged with meaningfully, that person’s mind has not been changed, their voting has not been changed, and their politics will only become more extreme.
Empower the people to control political discourse for themselves. Anything more is authoritarianism. Trying to make humans better thinkers, more reliably truthful, or at least more malleable, is a change that will have to take place over many, many years. Technology as we know it might not be around when humans finally become better tools of democracy. But the task of controlling all these little pieces of disinformation is too much to ask companies to accomplish. They have existed in the past and are not the disruptive game-changers that they are made out to be.
If you like this content and want to check out more like it, consider buying my new book, The Gig Society, for just $3.99! Thank you for your support!