Disinformation And Democracy

We are still in many ways adolescents in the way we are triggered by what we view and hear online. As digital tech develops we need to grow up with it.

In the final week of the American presidential election an opinion poll was published showing that the reliably and as good as politically indelible red state of Iowa showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 points. In the same period of time, other polls were emerging that suggested the momentum was increasingly with Harris. There was no event or disrupter, that anyone could point to, to explain why the Democrat candidate might suddenly be pulling away from her rival in what was understood to be the tightest and hardest to predict of political races.

As it turned out these polls proved to be false flags. Were they ‘misinformation’? Were they skewed ? If so, was it intentional ? Did it impact the results?

Of the myriad ways in which information is imparted, there are few if any that can’t be manipulated to influence, motivate or dissuade a target audience. We see this all the time in advertising and marketing. We see it in the way news platforms select and frame stories. We see it in the selection of interviewees and in the questions they are asked, and those they aren’t, even though they may be the questions uppermost in some listeners’ ears. Where there is a free flow of information in a society there will inevitably be disinformation and misinformation too.

It is not always, or even usually I would argue, intentional. We all perceive things according to many interwoven influences and prior experiences. Even what seems like black and white to some of us can show as grey to others and possibly even appear as the negative image that flips black and white around. This is what comes with an open gated digital highway. The best and only solution for misinformation and disinformation is more information to challenge and debunk it.

It might appear a bit of a stretch to claim that one person’s black is another’s white but I could pick any number of examples to prove the point. The Hunter Biden laptop story was broken by The New York Post in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election but was deemed to be malicious ‘election interference’ by Democrat leaning Twitter bosses who decided to remove the story from their platform. For Republican supporters, on the other hand, this story was a well-grounded charge of corruption against the Biden family. Had it been the Trump family, the post would certainly not have been suppressed.

In our own general election campaign we have seen how a brief hostile exchange between Taoiseach, Simon Harris, and a care worker has damaged the prospects of the Fine Gael party. Had this not been recorded, had it been suppressed, or, as Fine Gael reportedly requested, taken down once the party handlers got sight of it, how different would the campaign conversation now be?

Is this fair to a candidate ? Again, there are two ways of looking at the issue. Anyone can have a bad day, especially in the latter days of an arduous political campaign, and conversations may sometimes be at cross purposes. From another viewpoint, such moments are the Freudian slips that reveal the indifference and arrogance of a politician and a party too long in power. Information overload has its risks but weighed against information suppression and censorship are they not the better alternative in an open, democratic state?

One might ask how reputation and career destroying digital fire balls, resulting from misinformation, can be tolerated notwithstanding our dislike of the censorship of opinion? The fact is digital pile ons in the febrile world of concocted outrage don’t have to have those consequences. It’s always a choice to cancel or fire someone from their role or job. It’s the responsibility of all who use digital hubs for information to check their source and cross check claims against counter-claims. We are still in many ways adolescents in the way we are triggered by what we view and hear online. In the real world things move more slowly and we are more measured and circumspect in how we respond. The digital world has become our ‘real’ world more and more as technology advances and we simply have to grow up with it.

Digital media reflects the complex way in which we perceive things in the real world. It reflects the perverse way we sometimes register and interpret the words and actions of others. It reflects how reality is distorted through the lens of our fears, prejudices and interests. Even those who purport to exercise objective, expert or professional oversight appear, from all the evidence, to be as biased as those they presume to hold to account. You have only to scan the record of Facebook and Twitter moderators and the third party fact checkers they employ. As consumers of information, we need to learn that the caution and skepticism we consider appropriate in our real life dealings with people are more not less needed in the digital sphere. Something isn’t true because it’s tweeted by celebrities or repeated thousands of time by keyboard zealots who as often as not click before they think.

So many factors colour judgment. We know that even those who sit on the US Supreme Court can be counted on to deliver judgements that are coloured to one degree or other by their liberal or conservative leanings. Sometimes, the clouding of judgment by bias can both shocking and absurd and suggests that there there may be something stronger than mere bias at work. It’s a matter of opinion where bias shades into more resolute prejudice or bigotry.

When we encounter a particularly egregious example of warped judgment one might expect the offender to at least not attempt a defence when they are confronted. Surprising or not, that isn’t necessarily so. No less an academic luminary than former Harvard President, Claudine Gay,persisted in denying that a protest chant at a campus rally that called for genocide against Jews was racist while insisting the university had zero tolerance for all forms of racism. It came down to ‘context’ she argued. Her point seemed to be that words don’t necessarily mean what they say. People may not always intend to be understood literally.

While it is true that people don’t always mean to be understood literally and hyperbole is part of political protest, context isn’t only about the intentions of the speaker. It’s equally, as I pointed out, about the disposition of the hearers. In a febrile atmosphere there is always a risk that not everyone hears you in the way you intended, or claim you intended.

However, public opinion in Harvard found that Claudine Gay stretched credibility too far for her to remain in her position and she resigned.

Without the extensive, unedited coverage online activity brings to issues like protest marches, Harvard tolerance for potentially inflammatory rhetoric may not have registered as it did.

Now that the leftist liberal bias of Twitter has been replaced by the uncensored X of Elon Musk, some of those who used the platform intensively are leaving it because it has become ‘toxic’. They include newspapers and politicians. The new liberals want their beliefs protected from uncomfortable scrutiny. They want to cancel those who would challenge them. They prefer censorship provided the censors hold their persuasions. They can’t see that misinformation and disinformation can only be tested by opening them to rebuttal and discussion in an open forum. Censorship can actually protect misinformation and allows it to mutate and fester in a darker corner.

That should be obvious but it isn’t. These same people had no problem with the digital pile-ons that were allowed to maliciously and wrongfully destroy livelihoods and reputations on Twitter. They didn’t lament the lack of moderation in such instances because the victims were their ideological enemies. They included journalists like Kevin Myers and academics like the philosopher Roger Scroton and authors like J.K. Rowling. During the Repeal debate in 2018, the Irish government complained about an advertisement, placed in Facebook by the Pro-life campaign, because it was explicit and offensive. The advertisement was removed. It could be described as explicit and it had the potential to offend anyone who bought into the notion that a fetus at 12 weeks of gestation was a mere ‘clump of cells’. The image used was exactly the same image that thrills and astounds new parents as they watch their baby’s scan on a monitor.

So censorship is fine, even necessary, when it protects your views and beliefs, but unwarranted when it doesn’t, seems to be the thinking here. The complete lack of self awareness is astonishing.

The open information highway like any unguarded highway has to be negotiated with care. The same education on online safety and due diligence that we give our growing children applies to adults equally. Scepticism about everything we read online and off should be habitual. Even video footage or expert opinion can be presented to mislead. With the development of AI the need for guardedness is massively greater.

We could be spared all that trouble of course if there was some wholly neutral, all knowing, flawlessly thorough digital moderator. There isn’t. So let the words roll, collide, join forces or retreat from view. Let the great court of public opinion decide in its own time and with due measure within the parameters of its laws and values if, when and what words should have consequences.