Scotland Needs A Debate on Countering Disinformation.
Disinformation isn’t a new phenomenon — it’s been around for a long time. Over the past few years politicians, regulators and academics have opined extensively on the issue, and disinformation is now a permanent feature in the conversation we have around democracy, our values and the use of technology and social media.
The 2016 US election was the major event that caused the subject of disinformation to go mainstream. Although by no means limited to the US — far from it — it seems somewhat apposite that disinformation should dominate Donald Trump’s final few days in office, culminating in the storming of the US Congress, which was itself fuelled by disinformation on a huge scale.
I suspect the timing is accident rather than design, but just this week the Oxford Internet Institute published its latest paper entitled, ‘Industrialized Disinformation. 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation’. It’s a short report and is well worth your time. It points to some worrying statistics and trends.
Monitoring what it calls ‘cyber troops’, the report highlights a rise in governments and political actors — political parties and private firms acting on their behalf — spending millions of dollars to develop sophisticated strategies, tools and techniques to disrupt elections, democracy and undermine human rights the world over. It goes into some detail in highlighting cases of state organised trolling and harassment of political opponents and civil society activists — see Belarus and Hong Kong as two obvious examples.
The research also documents how social media is used to degrade the quality of political news in circulation and highlights the obvious dangers that these sophisticated strategies pose during a global pandemic, as states such as China and Iran seek to undermine trust in public health officials and the guidance they issue.
The authors tell us that in 2020 they documented 48 countries where there is evidence of private firms managing manipulation campaigns — up from 9 in 2017. 81 countries use social media to spread computational propaganda and disinformation — up from 28 in 2017. 57 of them use automated accounts (bots), 79 use human-curated accounts and 14 use hacked, stolen or impersonation accounts. It’s is a big and growing business.
This makes for grim reading, as the report documents examples from all across the globe — in democracies and authoritarian countries alike — where governments and political parties are spending big money to undermine democracy, harass political opponents and deepen societal divisions to breaking point, using social media.
When I’ve written and talked about this issue before, some have dismissed me as pursuing a ‘reds under the bed’ agenda. It is, of course, no such thing. It’s a problem that is real and growing.
The lesson for me is that we need greater information resilience amongst the public at large.
The pandemic has shown us that, like all major challenges, our fellow citizens are our greatest armoury in times of adversity. We need to turn our efforts to working out how we make all sections of our society information resilient.
The Oxford report outlines growing numbers of states and their proxies deploying sophisticated methods to attack free societies, we have a duty to ensure that each and every citizen has the know-how to spot disinformation so that they aren’t just a target to be exploited. Citizens become our armour, not the attack surface.
As we head into the Scottish Parliament elections, my hope is that our political parties can start a conversation with the public on how we confront this issue.
Whilst Scotland hasn’t suffered any disinformation attacks on a level with the 2016 US election, it is the case we have had low level disinformation, conspiracy theories and a toxifying of our public discourse that we should better protect against. We see it on social media and with the encroachment of outlets such as Kremlin-backed Sputnik and RT into Scotland’s domestic discussion.
The actors, their strategy and the techniques they deploy are more subtle now, but my prediction is that the sophistication and intensity will only grow in years to come.
There is much to be learned from countries such as Latvia and Finland, who have well understood the need to invest in information literacy from an early age. Teaching young people how to better navigate information online, protect themselves from hacking and how to spot fake news, is an investment in national security.
We should take this further and explore ways of engaging our adult population so that when a conspiracy theory starts flying around Facebook and WhatsApp groups, people are better equipped to disarm them.
A national information resilience strategy that has cross-party backing, includes the tech industry and academic leaders in this field, and is delivered online and in local communities across the country, should be what we aim for.
Teaching our fellow citizens in whatever language they use in their daily lives and incentivising them to learn how to better navigate the information environment, is an investment in our own domestic security that is long overdue.
This isn’t just about the pandemic, but ensuring our citizens are equipped and informed to a level that helps keep us all secure and acts as a deterrence from would-be adversaries from attempting to sow a disinformation campaign against us — ensuring Scotland is Q-Anon-proof and so that we don’t leave our future exposed to what happened in Washington DC last week.
Then we need a discussion about the international rules governing state-organised disinformation against other states. We have all kinds of international frameworks to prevent chemical weapons attacks and means to hold states accountable when they do happen, but why do we have no digital equivalent of the OPCW or Geneva Convention? Perhaps we can discuss that next time.
