New weapon needed to fight disinformation

This is one in a series of articles about how Canada should navigate regulating technology companies.

As a pandemic rages, most of the world’s attention has been focused on tackling a virus that has killed over two million people. COVID-19 affects people’s bodies. but there is also another virus among us, a virus that affects people’s minds. A virus for which no vaccine has yet been developed. It is the virus of conspiracy and disinformation that pervades social media.

Advances in technology have had both positive and negative impacts. While the positives outweigh the negatives, each new method of communication from the printing press to radio to motion pictures to social media has allowed for wider opportunities to spread disinformation.

Social media today has unparalleled reach. One Facebook post or tweet can eventually reach millions of people across international borders. This creates opportunities for extremist groups, especially hateful ones, to amplify self-serving lies.

Conspiracy theories and disinformation feed into existing biases. People who like donald Trump and dislike democrats are more apt to believe claims that the media is biased against him and thus turn to pro-trump social media for all their news. They then find thousands of posts telling them the election was stolen, based on allegations never proven in court. They hear from such groups as Qanon who allege that democratic leaders are a secret cabal of pedophiles running a sex trafficking ring from a Washington pizzeria. They begin to believe that Trump is a messiah-like figure who is planning a day of reckoning where thousands of the cabal’s leaders will be arrested. As people charged the Capitol, these were the lies that had culminated in thousands of Americans becoming domestic terrorists. That event showed us that the virus of disinformation can literally invade our capitols and threaten our democracies.

We cannot be complacent. We must act against this virus. It comes from both the left and the right. We must act swiftly, both domestically and in co-operation with other Western democracies.

When it comes to the pandemic we have learned to trust our medical professionals. When it comes to the virus of disinformation, the infodemic, we need to turn to professionals as well. The Canadian government has announced that it will take strong measures to tackle hate speech. We are strongly supportive of this effort. but hate speech is only part of the problem. A considerable amount of disinformation and conspiracy theories are not hate speech. Think, for example, of a conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccine actually makes you sick and is a government tool to control you. This is exceptionally dangerous speech but it is not hate. In addition, there is a considerable amount of hateful speech on social media that does not rise to the level of criminal speech.

So how do we best tackle disinformation? First, social media platforms cannot simply be left to control themselves. This has not worked. Second, we do not believe that governments are best placed to control platforms by themselves.

We believe a new institution is needed to fight against disinformation. Funded by both government and civil society, it would report to Parliament but remain independent in its decisions and be staffed by experts with both viewpoint and cultural diversity. It would be tasked with fighting disinformation by using the tools of science and tracking it like a disease, reporting on it with clinical objectivity like the Public health Agency of Canada.

The government would permit the new institution to collect data from the platforms to create a large and centralized data repository (a “data trust”) for use only by clinical disinformation experts. They can then use it to report to Parliament and security agencies on terrorist

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS CANNOT SIMPLY BE LEFT TO CONTROL THEMSELVES. THIS HAS NOT WORKED.

or security threats and antidemocratic forces or foreign interference on the networks, while at the same time protecting Canadians’ privacy rights.

The institution could report to platforms when they are hosting illegal speech that must be taken down and advise the platforms on how to handle hateful speech or disinformation that is not illegal. Like public health agencies it could issue public service announcements to combat disinformation, and advise platforms and governments on best practices. There would have to be strong Parliamentary oversight of the institute and the experts hired would have to be representative and diverse to inspire public confidence. Ideally the institution would be replicated in democracies across the world and would all work together through an umbrella organization like the WHO to tackle the virus.

So far no country has gotten the fight against disinformation right. If Canada can tackle this effectively, it can be an example to the world.

Anthony Housefather is the member of Parliament from Mount Royal, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour. Joel Finkelstein is the Director of the Network Contagion Research Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Rutgers University.