Democracy versus Social Media?

“Deepfakes or misuse of information . . . cannot really influence people or change outcomes

of elections without propagating on social networks… My biggest fear is the social networks

and how they actually handle disinformation and/or misinformation on their platforms.”

Wael AbdAlmageed, professor at the University of Southern California.

“[I]t remains painfully clear that social media companies are still failing to protect candidates, voters,

and elected officials from disinformation, misogyny, racism, transphobia, and violence.”

From an open letter to Axios from 60 activist groups.

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher

or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Almost immediately after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he issued a tweet that reinforced a completely unfounded, thoroughly debunked and obviously false conspiracy theory that 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, Nancy’s husband, was attacked in his house after a late-night clubbing rendezvous with a gay partner. Much to the delight of conspiracy theory-driven Republicans, Musk’s pledge, to allow a more open forum for legitimate debate on Twitter under his ownership… with some required responsibility for posts… died instantly. Clearly, on Musk’s Twitter, anything goes. That fake Pelosi message also found support on Trump Social, where indeed, anything right-wing already goes.

The above cited federal statute – a legal liability “safe harbor” for purportedly passive Web platforms that post third party content – is at the heart of a controversy on how that law might be amended, a goal of both major American parties. While virtually all major social media sites have systems to remove toxic images and incendiary falsehoods, they are all woefully unsuccessful in this effort. Republicans want less filtering (claiming an anti-conservative bias); Democrats want more means to remove obvious falsehoods, mendacity often aimed at tilting public opinion over candidates and issues. Needless to say, Musk’s view would only propagate major lies and enable foreign players interested in influencing American elections to their benefit.

Mark Sullivan, writing for the October 28th FastCompany.com, asked various experts what they believed the scope of the misuse of social media problem is and what, if anything, social media giants should or could do to stop this tsunami of toxic conspiracy theories, deep fake imaging and egregious political lying that seem to define that universe today. “Social networks, which enjoy protections from lawsuits stemming from user-generated content [see above statutory excerpt], are the go-to media channel for spreading political misinformation and disinformation (the former: falsehoods unwittingly, or half-wittingly, spread; the latter meaning falsehoods knowingly spread to affect a political outcome).

“Since the 2016 election, when Russian operatives successfully seeded Facebook with ads and posts designed to sow division among U.S. voters, threats to U.S. elections have evolved. In 2022, experts say, malign actors spend more time and resources operating within the information space to mislead and disrupt, rather than on executing cyberattacks on election systems or communications systems. Another shift from 2016 is that most misinformation originates from domestic groups rather than foreign, although some researchers point out that domestic and foreign state-sponsored groups with aligned political interests often work together. The common thread in all of this is social networks, which continue to be weaponized to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt among the electorate.

“In 2020 and 2021, right-wing operatives used Facebook and other platforms to spread The Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and its winner illegitimate. More recently, researchers at New York University found it easy to run ads on both Facebook and TikTok containing blatantly false information about the logistics (voting times and places) and credibility of the upcoming midterm…

“USC’s AbdAlmageed believes that of all the possible forms of misinformation we may see before the midterms, bad actors will most likely try an old trick: grabbing an old image and mislabeling it to harm some candidate or call the integrity of the election into question. The usual approach is taking a legitimate photograph from a news story from the past and adding text saying the photo is from a current event.”

The underlying problem is that controversy and the spread of falsehoods generates more Web traffic, which generates more viewership and hence more advertising dollars. Given the economic downturn we are facing, major corporate sponsors are cutting their advertising budgets, making social media platforms even more covetous of those ad dollars. Last year, in testimony before Congress, Facebook (Meta) whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke about how her former employer worked to present a good public face of policing toxic content, when in fact most of that effort was minimal and aimed only to show they were trying. Nothing really has changed.

But democracy needs truth to survive. Using artificial intelligence and other established spotting techniques, Sullivan’s experts opined that social media should focus on detecting and fact-checking repurposed images, targeting messages from election deniers, focus heavily on robotic messaging from foreign sources, purge posts of obvious flat false claims and generate multiparty (private and governmental) efforts against defamatory content. Americans seem so gullible.

It strikes me that teaching young minds, at least at a high school level, to learn to review and identify “fake news,” to do their own fact-checking and to report posts that they learn are obviously false are skillsets all high school students should have. Time to upgrade normal educational curricula into the 21st century… unless biased school boards need to crush truth. And yes, there are lesson plans that can help educators do precisely that: materials are available from a nonprofit called the News Literacy Project, for example. We can protect democracy and battle for truth to prevail over manipulative falsehood. Or we can watch democracy, very much under attack from so many sources, just fritter away.

I’m Peter Dekom, and evidence of the fragility of democracy has never been clearer than it is in the era of virtually unbridled social media.