The spread of misinformation must be curbed

The recess period has given me more opportunity to get out and about across the magnificent Stirling constituency.

I’ve held street surgeries, which have given me a chance to take forward some issues that have been brought to me by local residents.

I’m proud to say that I’m now an honorary Scout, having visited the youth group, newly set up in Raploch – which really is a testament to the dedication of the Rev Barry Hughes and many other members of the local community.

This follows a week in Washington DC, where I met with several US Senators as well as delegates from the UN. As the SNP’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, building links overseas is an important part of my role in Parliament. The UK is attempting to negotiate trade deals for the first time in around half a century, including with Trump’s America.

Representing Scotland’s interests with elected representatives in countries that the UK is looking to do business with is crucial. There are a lot of (not entirely baseless) concerns around what a trade deal between the US and the UK would mean for our farming sector, food standards and the public nature of services like the NHS.

I was there thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Institute, and attended a series of meetings that focused on disinformation in our politics. It gave me an insight into the sheer scale of disinformation in US political campaigning. The Trump 2020 Campaign (with a headquarters jokingly referred to as The Death Star) is spending over $1 billion on the most extensive disinformation campaign in the country’s history, utilising a great many online platforms in order to do so.

A corner stone of any democracy, the freedom of the press, is belittled through the weakening of the institution by the White House since 2016. A recent poll found that just 11 per cent of Trump voters trusted the media, more frighteningly, 91 per cent of them turned to the President himself for accurate, trusted information.

The Pew Research

Centre reports that 62 per cent of US adults get their news from social media. Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. Hardly considered to be a guardian of accurate information, it holds vast amounts of data on billions of people, and, as has been revealed in recent years, this data is for sale.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal began to lift the lid on this – but it demonstrated the extent to which aggressive disinformation tactics, used in the Trump 2016 campaign, were impacting UK politics, and were deployed during the EU referendum.

The UK Government has announced plans to strengthen Ofcom’s role making social media websites more responsible but does not attempt to tackle the chaotic spread of disinformation and the use of peoples’ personal data.

This from a governing Tory Party that was found by an independent fact checking organisation to have misled voters in around 90 per cent of its adverts over the General Election campaign.

Disinformation is a major industry, and has a serious detrimental impact on the integrity of our democracy. This will continue unless governments get serious about tackling it and our legal system catches up with technology.

The freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy