Miroslava Sawiris

Five Tools We Need to Fight Disinformation

Miroslava Sawiris — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:35:10 +0000

According to the report, across Central and Eastern Europe, 34% believe that COVID-19 is a hoax designed to manipulate populations. With hundreds of deaths around the world occurring as a result of related to the coronavirus, the pandemic has demonstrated the critical importance of limiting the impact of disinformation on our societies.

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Only an approach that encompasses all of society can truly improve resilience to disinformation. It needs to consist of five elements, none of which can be neglected if we want to create a healthier information environment. These are: legal instruments on European or national level, disinformation demonetization, responsible digital citizenship, quality journalism and strategic communication. All these elements require cooperation from public officials and state institutions, the research community, civil society actors as well as citizens.

Basic Rules

EU member states need to actively contribute to the swift implementation of the Digital Services Act and the European Democracy Action Plan that will establish much-needed boundaries for digital space. Non-members can work to adopt legislation modeled on the European code and collaborate with the EU to set basic rules in line with the principle that what is illegal offline is illegal online. For example, if Holocaust denial is illegal in countries such as Austria or Slovakia, such content should not be acceptable on digital platforms that either have community standards that are not in line with legislation in which these platforms operate or because of a failure to uphold those standards.

Furthermore, regulation needs to foster transparency and accountability in areas such as content ranking and moderation. These instruments, if implemented properly with all key stakeholders such as digital platforms, the research community, civil society and technology specialists on board, could significantly limit the reach of harmful content.

Defunding Disinformation

According to the Global Disinformation Index, the estimated yearly profit generated by disinformation come to $235 million, propelling disinformation actors to incredible influence. Legal instruments can help disrupt the economy of disinformation by ensuring that ad agencies will not be able to place ads on sites spreading fake news, hate speech and conspiracy theories. Google already announced that it will ads on webpages promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories. However, implementation of this policy is due to a lack of transparency measures and standardized monitoring. Similarly, social media platforms should not be allowed to place ads next to hate speech and disinformation.

In this effort, civil society organizations have been paving the way, with projects such as Slovakia’s , Czech nelez.cz or, in the US, the Anti-Defamation League’s Stop Hate for Profit. They are based on raising awareness of disinformation outlets while inviting companies to opt out of placing ads on such channels. Freedom of speech does not mean the right to profit from disinformation. Demonetizing disinformation would lead to an immediate improvement in the quality of the information environment as it would limit the reach of disinformation by removing economic incentives that drive it.

Responsible Digital Citizenship

Many citizens have been caught unprepared for the radical changes to information consumption and production in the wake of the information revolution. Without the necessary education and skills, users often share content without checking their sources, unaware of the fact that they are unwittingly helping to spread hate and false information. We all need to accept the fact that responsible citizenship extends to online sphere as well.

It is crucial to include the concept of responsible digital citizenship for all age groups in teaching curricula starting from elementary schools. Similar training could be implemented in employment onboarding schemes. It should cover all aspects of digital footprints such as personal data protection, norms of online conduct and the consequences of sharing malign information among our communities.

Quality Journalism

Another factor in the disinformation equation is that quality journalism has suffered globally in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and with the . Independent journalism needs to be systematically supported, possibly by taxing tech giants and using a portion of that money to fund media resources. As one of the cornerstones of functioning democracies, the demise of local outlets is highly worrying. Support for local news and the protection of investigative journalists from threats and attacks would work as a strong antidote to the increasing dissemination of toxic content.

Strategic Communication

Often, state administrations and European institutions suffer from an inability to communicate their messages in an accessible and engaging way. It is of the utmost importance that all state institutions, from regional to federal, proactively communicate their activities and benefits to citizens because in the absence of such communication, an information void is created that can be easily abused by malign actors.

Strategic communication is the go-to tool when striving to build trust with constituencies. Such trust will also likely be the determining factor in the relative success of overcoming the pandemic, as people’s willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19 with trust in public institutions.

Regulation and demonetizing disinformation are reactive steps that address a social wound that has been left untreated for too long. But proactive measures of fostering responsible digital citizenship, supporting quality journalism and conducting efficient strategic messaging will help increase democratic’ resilience to influence operations. Even partial progress in each of these five domains would lead to massive improvements in the quality of our shared information environment.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Five Tools We Need to Fight Disinformation appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Who Will Make Rules for the Internet?

Miroslava Sawiris — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 18:29:30 +0000

National legislations across the European Union — with the exception of states that have implemented their own digital laws, such as and — are very difficult to enforce when it comes to online. This is because, in the absence of overarching legislation that would govern digital space, tech giants implement community standards that may sometimes contradict the laws of countries in which they operate.

A Lawless Web

It is undeniable that digital platforms and social media networks provide us with essential services. Yet these services are not free as we all pay for it with our data. As Scott Goodson mentions in an for Forbes, “If you’re not paying for it … you are the product.”

The subsequent use of data by tech giants and third-parties alike is shrouded in mystery, which Shoshana Zuboff, the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” calls “moats of secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise.” While our data might be used in a non-transparent way for machine learning and political campaigning through ad targeting, democracies worldwide are grappling with the fallout.

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The reason why the consequences of the growing influence of the “wild wild web” are so difficult to address is a lack of basic frameworks to address lawlessness online, which up till now relies mostly on arbitrary guidelines defined by tech giants themselves. Legal experts, scholars and policymakers have been mostly absent from the conversation, as the overarching narrative up until recently has been that any such regulation would represent unhealthy government interference into business and innovation.

The recently Facebook Oversight Board on Removing Objectionable Content promises to go some way to remedy this problem, and observers are eager to see its impact in action.

What’s Not Acceptable Offline Is Acceptable Online

The discussion surrounding Holocaust denial illustrates the inconsistencies imposed on states and markets in which unregulated social media platforms operate. National legislation of many countries, such as Germany, Austria, Spain, Israel, France, Slovakia or the Czech Republic, consider the Holocaust to be a crime. In Slovakia, for example, it is punishable by up to three years in prison.

Yet content on Holocaust denial is widespread on Slovak on Facebook despite users reporting it as harmful. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in a landmark 2019 case, Pastörs v. Germany, that Holocaust denial is not protected by free speech.

This understanding is not straightforwardly shared by digital platforms. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, that content on Holocaust denial should not be taken down from the platform. There is a mismatch between what is acceptable online versus offline — i.e., what is illegal offline is not illegal online.

Theoretically, national authorities of the above-mentioned states could try to prosecute social media users for sharing content denying the Holocaust. (Some countries, such as , have adopted legislation to force digital platforms to comply.)

Yet, in reality, that is near impossible as states simply do not have the resources to track every piece of content and then prosecute everyone who has shared it. Furthermore, by the time any case is closed, the content would remain online as it would have been undoubtedly copied and shared far and wide. It also poses an interesting question about state sovereignty and the potential complicity of service providers in criminal behavior, as they defy the national laws of countries in which they operate.

The Tide Is Turning in the EU

Partial answers on a European level may come with the passing of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which is postponed until the first quarter of due to the coronavirus pandemic. The recently published on the DSA recommends that “the principle of ‘what is illegal offline is also illegal online,’ as well as the principles of consumer protection and user safety, should also become guiding principles of the future regulatory framework.”

If this becomes a guiding principle of the DSA, digital platforms will no longer be able to tailor their community standards arbitrarily. Instead, social networks like Facebook would have to comply with national and European legislation.

Such a development would be welcomed not only by those who care about the quality of democracy in the digital age, but also by digital platforms themselves. For years, social media networks have faced intense criticism and scrutiny for haphazard decision-making in policy areas which, in some places, have had .

In 2019, Zuckerberg gave his two cents about making rules for the internet and who should be responsible for doing so. “Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks,” he in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone.” He further this point in a recent video conference with Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market, asking for European leadership on platform regulation.

Zuckerberg is right. Policy frameworks and regulations are not the main areas of expertise of tech companies, nor should they be. Such efforts should be led by national and international institutions in cooperation with tech companies, civil society actors and research scholars to ensure that any upcoming frameworks will strike the right balance between each stakeholder’s diverse interests. With the increasing fragmentation of the EU single market due to the implementation of new digital laws on national levels and the prevalence of hate speech online, time is of the essence.

*[ is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]