Internet has become Wild West and it’s endangering democracy

SOCIAL media giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have grown rapidly in the Wild West culture of the internet. Their mantra has been to move fast and break things, as they deliver massive changes to the way we find, consume and even make news and entertainment. Yet in this process they are putting at risk one of the most important treasures of our society: our democracy itself.

Over the past two years we have become more aware of the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and the way it can spread at speed like a virus infecting millions of viewers with its lies.

The term itself has become open to abuse, being used casually by people who don’t like criticism or scrutiny, to dismiss any news article or investigation they just happen not to agree with, whatever the level of truth contained within it.

What we are really talking about when we discuss ‘fake news’ is the deliberate targeting of people with campaigns of disinformation designed to confuse and mislead, and ultimately to influence actions.

The House of Commons Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport launched its inquiry into disinformation following investigations which showed that, thanks to social media and, in particular, Facebook with its two billion users, these campaigns in many cases were reaching more people than the real news – and such was the clever way the content was presented, people found it hard to distinguish between the truth and the fake.

During the last US Presidential election, this included fake stories about brutal inter-racial crimes, and a sickening article about a paedophile ring that led a man to turn up at a pizza restaurant armed with a gun, looking to rescue the children he believed were being held there.

Such fake stories are bad at any time, but have the potential to cause even more damage during election campaigns.

Increasingly, people of all ages get their information from social media. Rather than reading a newspaper or website, or listening to radio or television, they receive it in bitesize pieces shared online, including through advertising.

On Facebook, advertisers can target you through your newsfeed, so that their messages are mixed in with those from your friends. You have no control over this and cannot block advertising from your Facebook newsfeed.

Communications agencies are gathering vast quantities of data to build up profiles on millions of Facebook users so that they know exactly who to target and what the message needs to say to have the greatest impact.

Some might say this is just advertising, but having a personalised message sent to your smartphone is very different to seeing a TV advert.

Facebook gathers data about everything we do on their website, and track us when we are elsewhere on the internet.

Academics believe that an analysis of all the things you have liked on Facebook gives a more accurate prediction of your personality than you would get from your closest friend.

And Facebook has failed to keep this data safe.

They have made it far too easy for political consultancies, such as the disgraced Cambridge Analytica, to scrape this data for their campaigns.

These techniques of data profiling and targeting using Facebook advertising tools have also been used by agencies in Russia to target voters in elections in other nations, which is against the law. They directly targeted 150million Americans with political adverts during the 2016 Presidential election.

Our inquiry has heard evidence of their attempts to interfere in the Brexit referendum, using both Facebook and Twitter, and in elections in Europe. In France in 2017, Facebook was asked to investigate suspicious activity on its site linked to the presidential election and ended up deleting 30,000 fake accounts.

These Russian campaigns were run without Facebook spotting their activity. Users didn’t spot them because there was no requirement for the advertisers to show their real identity. So an advert run from St Petersburg could be made to look like a message from a community group where you live.

The tech companies have made money out of the targeting techniques they have developed to help advertisers reach us. And these tools have been made available to bad actors – and used to spread disinformation.

That is why we have to act to safeguard our democracy.

In our report we say firms such as Facebook should have a legal obligation to act against known sources of content that could mislead and cause harm. There needs to be real transparency, so we know who is targeting us and where they are doing it from.

During election periods, political advertising should only be allowed by registered campaigns. In financial services, businesses contribute to the administration of consumer protection regulation. Similarly, the big tech firms should help the costs of the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is responsible for enforcing our data protection laws.

They should also contribute through a levy to fund more media literacy programmes in schools, something they have started to do but could easily afford to support far more.

Technology is changing the world fast. We must act now to keep up and protect democracy.

We need to know who is targeting us – and where