Shut It Down!

The free press, especially the vociferous critics often referred to as the Fifth Estate, have taken on a socio-cultural role in the United States: particularly watching and criticizing elected officials, making them accountable. With Donald Trump declaring what our Founding Fathers declared sacred – freedom of the press – to empower the “enemy of the people” (MSM – mainstream media like CNN and MSNBC) and to demand restraints on limits on his journalist and comedic critics, the very bedrock of our democracy is being eroded daily. No other developed democracy anywhere is crying for restraints on press freedom. 

The challenge in this maelstrom of “fake news,” with a significant flow of that emanating from the President himself, is how to separate truly damaging “fake news,” stuff that motivates extremists to their extreme and often deadly behavior, from our First Amendment value of truly free speech, even if the content is wildly unpopular or deeply provocative. In India, fake and photoshopped photographs of unknown origin, alleging that Muslim kidnapper-murderers were on the loose, went viral on the popular WhatsApp (a Facebook messaging app). Parents kept their children indoors, not letting them go out to play. Vigilantes responded with violence.

“In recent months, about two dozen people across India have been lynched — beaten to death — by mobs driven to violence by what they've read on social media… Fake news is blamed for misleading voters and possibly influencing elections in the West. But in India, it's killing people.” NPR.org, 7/18/18. In societies where communications technologies are relatively new, social media – “I’ve seen the photographs!” – does not meet with the relative skepticism that more developed countries express. But even in developed countries, fake news or trends making promoters of anti-democratic violence ubiquitous and socially acceptable foment danger and death.

With “fine people” on both sides, Donald Trump’s 2017 expression of support for torch-bearing white supremacists in Charlottesville where one counter protester was murdered, has spawned a number of violent, racially driven incidents since. Hate crimes have spiked since Trump’s seeming support for white nationalism. But at least the media has not ceased its criticism even as social media seems unable to grapple with their power to spread dangerous lies. Russia took and continues to take total advantage of the open and viral flow of fake news in our election cycles.

Until recently, the only feedback we got on Russia’s massive social media effort to deploy fake news and voter manipulation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been Donald Trump’s denial of any impact. Since then, however, several major universities, using high-speed computers and sophisticated software analytics, have been able to trace Russia’s increased Web-based interference to parallel polling that tracked the candidates during the campaign. The most recent study, from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, “demonstrates that Trump's gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack.

“‘Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls,’ wrote Damian Ruck, the study's lead researcher, in an article explaining his findings… The study found that every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to the IRA predicted a 1 percent increase in opinion polls for Trump.

“In an interview with NBC News, Ruck said the research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump's favor. As to whether it affected the outcome of the election: ‘The answer is that we still don't know, but we can't rule it out.’” NBCNews.com, July 1^st. Hard to believe that a steep rise in popularity did not generate more votes; it was only Trump who received the polling boost. And remember, three key electoral states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – were Trump’s margin of victory… representing a mere 75,000 total popular votes.

But what’s the alternative? The “this is how Asia does it” response is to shut down the entire Internet within individual national borders. “From 2016 through 2018, the digital rights advocacy group Access Now documented 371 instances worldwide in which authorities restricted internet service or mobile apps, with more than half the cases occurring in 2018.

“The vast majority of shutdowns — 310 — occurred in Asia, home to emerging economies with large numbers of new internet users and where the free flow of information often poses a direct challenge to authoritarian governments.

“China remains the model for internet censorship and surveillance, but India, which bills itself as the world’s largest democracy, has been the quickest to cut off internet service… According to one local watchdog , India already has imposed 56 internet suspensions this year, often in the disputed northern territory of Kashmir , where security forces have used harsh tactics to quell a long-running separatist movement...

“This year, social media were temporarily blocked in Sri Lanka after the deadly Easter bombings and in Indonesia during unrest after April’s presidential election. Sudan’s military rulers last month attempted to quash massive demonstrations by blacking out almost all internet and phone service, and sending paramilitary groups to violently break up protests.

“In Myanmar, where the overwhelming majority of people access the internet on their phones, the nine townships where cellular data service was interrupted had a combined population of about 1 million people in 2014, when the country’s last census was conducted. No one knows for sure how many live there now. Huge numbers of civilians fled Rakhine after the army launched a devastating crackdown against Rohingya Muslim civilians beginning in 2017.

“Tens of thousands more have left their homes in recent months to escape a new round of violence — this time between the army and a Rakhine Buddhist militant group known as the Arakan Army. The group, which backed government forces against the Rohingya but is now demanding greater autonomy for the country’s poorest state, reportedly recruits civilians and is believed to number several thousand fighters…

“Protecting public security is the main reason cited by governments to justify clamping down on the internet, said Mai Truong, a research director at the New York-based advocacy group Freedom House… Another is to stem the flow of misinformation, particularly during periods of social or political unrest. (Several East Asian countries have also passed or are considering laws that criminalize social media posts that governments find false or damaging.)

“‘This trend is growing in part because governments are learning from each other,’ Truong said. ‘When one government shuts down the internet with little consequence, it lowers the opportunity cost for other governments to follow suit when the desire arises.’

“But experts say there are real costs to such shutdowns, even if they only last a short time… A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution calculated that 81 temporary shutdowns over 12 months caused at least $2.4 billion in lost economic activity. More recently, a study funded by Facebook found that disrupting internet access for one day in a country with medium-level connectivity produces a loss of 1% of the country’s daily economic output… ‘Network shutdowns likely do more harm than good, cutting citizens off from the ability to communicate critical information with one another and seek services in times of need,’ Truong said.” Shashank Bengali writing for the July 1^st Los Angeles Times. 

Is having social-media-employee censors, poring over everything from exceptionally graphic animal cruelty postings to outright incitements to kill racial minorities, the answer? Who trusts them? But who trusts government censors either? Can a true democracy sustain in this onslaught of self-appointed political manipulators with autocratic disruption as their goal? Is it worse when the malevolent “fake news” creator-in-chief is the President himself?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and American democracy has been taken to the emergency room for triage with the prognosis anything but certain.