Adjust or Die: Democracy in the Age of Digital Disinformation
By Edward Schumacher-Matos and Anuradha Herur
The global media landscape has always adapted to rapidly changing technologies. Today, the internet is the source for all things media. While this new media may have brought the world closer together, it has also created the new dangers of social divisions and anarchy within nations.
Just as these dangers cross sectors and borders, so too must the solutions. Until now, the global conversation has been blindered, moving from the marvels of the internet, to legal questions of sovereignty and governance, to alarms about its dangers. Democratic societies have only just started talking about difficult solutions that will require curbing the freedoms of individuals, companies or both. They must do so, or face the growing attraction of authoritarian models that promise national cohesion and security.
One of the biggest threats from new media is the proliferation of disinformation. A recent study by Oxford University found that at least seventy countries had been targeted with social media disinformation campaigns, by both domestic groups and foreign governments. The words “fake news” have become commonplace, and while there is little consensus on what this means, disinformation broadly refers to the spread of false information to influence public opinion.
Concern is high in the United States as the 2020 elections approach. There has been much scrutiny around the effects of the Russian government’s disinformation campaign from the 2016 election cycle. However, while that campaign was effective, it paled next to the disinformation spread by Americans themselves, sowing discord that only continues to grow.
The same has been seen in countries with strong political and social institutions in Europe and even in advanced states like New Zealand. In emerging market countries with weaker institutions, from Myanmar to Brazil, the spread of mobile phone usage and, with it, the spread of disinformation is a more immediately existential issue that treads closely to violence. Governments—and citizens—are panicking.
Small wonder then that the Chinese model, the Great Chinese Firewall, has had growing appeal in African countries, Russia, and even India. That model calls for heavy censorship, and routing all communications through the state.
One obvious cost is the impact on personal freedoms in the country. Less obvious is the international impact of a splintering of the internet. This “splinternet” is a direct contradiction of the internet’s founding promise to spread information more or less equally for the benefit of all humankind.
What can we do about these problems?
An international answer would make sense, but a clear solution is not on the horizon. The global institutional debate has mostly focused on internet governance, questions of sovereignty and stakeholder models. That debate has been dwarfed by questions within each country regarding national regulations and the far more fundamental issues of culture, cohesion, privacy, and violence. Some answers will necessarily be national. Others, such as the use of anti-monopoly laws to address excesses, will necessarily become international. But whatever the immediate issue, it is clear that all citizens in all countries should be comparing notes while searching for solutions to maintain the best of the internet without being overwhelmed by the dangers.
Part of the debate carries into the internet companies themselves. What can they do to curb excesses? What is the limit of their self-interest? Companies, supported by academic researchers, first look for technological solutions. Perhaps it is only natural that they approach it in that way. But is this enough, and will technological solutions alone ever be sufficient? The answer goes straight to questions of free enterprise versus government regulation, and debates over what is best for the common good.
Whatever the answers, it is clear that societies cannot be paralyzed by the debates. The adults in the room have to stand up and take responsibility by experimenting with solutions. Adjusting the balance among rights and freedoms was always meant to be an ongoing exercise in today’s democracies. We either adjust or we die.
Edward Schumacher-Matos has been a prize-winning journalist at some of the nation’s most prestigious news outlets, an academic at top universities, and a media entrepreneur. Prof. Schumacher-Matos’s his experience has ranged from digital media, international reporting, cross-cultural communication and migration research.
Prof. Schumacher-Matos began his media career while a student at Fletcher, working nights on the foreign desk at The Boston Globe and as a reporter at the Quincy Patriot Ledger, covering Boston’s South Shore. He moved to Japan, where he was a prolific stringer for The Washington Post. He then joined The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was part of a team to win a Pulitzer Prize covering the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Prof. Schumacher-Matos moved to The New York Times, where he was the NYC economic develop reporter and bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Madrid. After two years as director of the Spanish Institute in New York, he joined The Wall Street Journal, where he became founding editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal Americas. Professor Schumacher-Matos left to start his own chain of four Spanish language dailies in Houston, Austin, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, with backing from Pearson. His record of journalistic excellence and ethics led him to being selected as ombudsman at NPR, his most recent news job.
As an academic,Prof. Schumacher-Matos has been the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where for three years he taught on immigration policy. At Harvard, he also was a Shorenstein Fellow on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and founder and director of the Migration and Integration Studies Program. He became the James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment Issues at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he taught digital strategy and courses on reporting and international news analysis, before returning to Fletcher.
Reflecting his specialty on mass migration, Professor Schumacher-Matos is currently a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, as well as a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington and the Global Migration Center at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. He has been a Fulbright Fellow in Japan and a Bi-National Commission Fellow in Spain.
Anuradha Herur has written both for The Hindu, which is a leading national newspaper in India, as well as smaller local newspapers and blogs. She has also worked extensively in law and policy. She was a summer policy intern at the UNDP in New Delhi, where she occasionally liaised between the Ministry of New and Renewable Resources, and the ISA team at UNDP.
At Fletcher, she is a second year MALD student, studying Human Security and International Communication. Her research focuses on the impact of media in all its forms on the sovereignty and self-determination of nations. In the summer, she worked a research intern with Global Press Journal, which is a news organization that mostly reports on local human rights and environmental issues in over 15 countries.
Anuradha has a BA LLB (Hons.) in Criminal Law from Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala, Punjab.
“Fake News” is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Courtesy of Christoph Scholz / Flickr
