PassW0rd – 14th November 2018 (Fake News)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello, this is Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Peter Warren. Or is it? Do you believe all you hear? Am I really Pete? Or a bot? Or something much worse? A troll, maybe? Later, I’ll be testing you to see whether or not you can correctly tell fake news from true news in the first ever Password: True or False prize quiz. And in the interests of transparency, you’ll hear this sound effect whenever there’s a bit more information needed in order to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And at the end of the show, all will be revealed in our transparency report. But first, the issue that is troubling Mr. Trump in so many ways and the rest of us in so many other more serious ways. Fake news. Because in this program, we’re taking a long hard look at the phenomenon now responsible for murder and genocide, as we saw with the use of a Facebook technology to coordinate the Rohingya massacres in Burma. WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, has spread rumors in the last few days that have led to murders in Mexico and have resulted in lynchings in India.

Speaker C: You know, we’ve had evidence in the committee of the role that Facebook has played in the genocide in Burma against Rohingya Muslims. So using Facebook and using that platform, there have been campaigns which have poisoned society in Burma and which have contributed to ethnic cleansing and the murder and torture of many thousands of people. We can’t just stand by and say we’re not going to do anything about this, and certainly platforms like Facebook simply can’t stand by and say, you know, we don’t need to do anything about this. You know, they have such influence. There are some developing nations like the Philippines, like India, where people only access the internet through Facebook. That is their means of accessing the internet. So we apply monopoly legislation to all other areas, and it seems that this is an area where we haven’t really got to grips with what’s going on.

Speaker B: What’s going on is that Facebook is offering its free basic service to developing countries through its internet.org platform. It gives people who couldn’t otherwise afford the internet in regions of the world where connectivity is limited free access to a limited number of websites via a Facebook satellite, including Facebook, of course. This might help people in remote parts, but it gives Facebook a monopoly. As we are now hearing with stories like that of Cambridge Analytica, the social network is also able to change the outcome of elections and referendums. But, you could claim, newspapers do that too. But with broadcasters The moment an election is called, they have to provide balance. Part of the argument is whether the internet companies broadcast, publish, or are simply dumb platforms. And that’s not me saying that. Fake news and rumour can be deadly to democracy. As recently as the beginning of this month, Elizabeth Denham, the Information Commissioner, gave evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee. Regarding the activities of Aaron Banks, the Brexiteer, and the Leave EU campaign, and said that a disturbing disregard for voters’ personal privacy had been uncovered by the Information Commissioner’s Office’s investigation into the political uses of voters’ data. It’s a war being fought on two fronts. First, there is a theft of data to target people. And then there are the distorted messages aimed at provoking them. On the same day that Elizabeth Denham spoke to the Select Committee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee ripped into Facebook and Google in a speech in Lisbon and called for a Magna Carta for the web. He cited the following problems: We have fake news. We have problems with privacy. We have problems with abuse of personal data. We have people being profiled in a way that they can be manipulated by clever ads. And it’s not just the usual suspects who laid into the tech giants. Paul Dacre, the outgoing editor of the Daily Mail and renowned bruiser of what used to be Fleet Street, led the charge. “The ultimate solution, as with the oil barons in the last century, is to break them up,” he said. “Their monopolistic power is too great, and that fundamental human characteristic The need for privacy against the industrial-scale theft of our data will reassert itself. There will be a turning away from algorithm-created news in favour of authentic, regulated, curated journalism. According to Professor Constantine Sandys from Hertfordshire University, who is an advisor to the Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, it’s very simple. It’s about what you put on the side of your battle bus and the number of people at your inauguration. It’s the evidence.

Speaker D: I think while we’ve spoken a lot about sort of maybe a negative side to print journalism, there is a kind of a good history of exposing things, exposing lies, exposing cover-ups, and so on. Some of this has been done by newspapers, but it’s also possible for individuals or teams working independently to to expose misinformation, whether it’s online or in a newspaper or whether it’s something a politician or whoever said. And there’s this— I think there’s a space for that. There’s a space for exposing fake news, and there are ways of doing this. And while, you know, we talked before about there can be kind of different perspectives on, on the same thing, nonetheless there are ways of bringing the truth out. And I don’t know about giving individual numbers out of 10 or 5 or whatever for websites or papers, but I think there is a value in exposing lies. And in some ways this is easier than ever because, you know, in a way we’re all journalists now. And I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but in a way someone, Someone can be there with a phone camera or whatever and show something and then tweet it or whatever immediately, you know, whether it’s police shooting somebody or whatever. And that can be done. And so I think there is a space for providing evidence to show that certain places have a tendency to misinform.

Speaker B: Twitter is also under scrutiny. For allegedly spreading fake news using bots and trolls. Darren Linville, associate professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, with his fellow researcher Patrick Warren—no relation to me, by the way—has been sifting through millions of tweets to find out how it’s done and what effect it has on elections, including the midterms held just last week.

Speaker E: As I’m sure you know, we’ve dealt with a variety of attacks from disinformation operators outside of the U.S. and inside of the U.S., for that matter. There was a lot of focus on that in the 2016 election, but it’s continued through to today, and it has frankly increased. I’ve done a lot of work here at Clemson University with my colleague Patrick Warren looking at tweets from the Internet Research Agency that’s based in St. Petersburg, those famous Russian trolls. And we’ve looked closely at several million tweets from this organization and had a good sense of the type of work that they’ve done. One of the things that we have really focused on is the idea that it hasn’t been about a single election. It’s an ongoing attack over a lengthy period of time. We’ve focused a lot on Twitter, although obviously they’re active on on every major platform, Facebook, Instagram, even Reddit. But like I said, we have focused mostly on Twitter. And there have been more tweets from that organization identified by Twitter in the year after the 2016 presidential election here in the U.S. than in the year prior. And those tweets have come in a larger variety of languages as well after the 2016 election. So it’s very clear to us that they think what they did was successful. They got more resources, they moved into a bigger office, and they, you know, hired folks with different expertise in a variety of languages. So it’s an ongoing issue and promises to be for quite some time.

Speaker B: So talk us through this. What is it? There’s this big office in St. Petersburg. How many people? How much trolling is coming from there?

Speaker E: At this point, it’s hard to say. We know that I’ve read reporting that their staff is over 100 people. Their budget is in the tens of millions. But it is very difficult to say exactly what the volume is coming out of that organization right now. And in fact, it’s hard to say even looking back because we’re very reliant on what Twitter says, what Twitter and the other platforms report to us. There have been some other organizations that have identified disinformation. For instance, just before the election, our FBI reported to Facebook regarding a number of accounts that they had identified on Facebook’s platform, and Facebook pulled those accounts down and made them public. There’s another security organization called FireEye. They identified for Twitter a number of accounts that were active in Iran. In disinformation, but it is still very difficult to know exactly how much disinformation is out there coming from this organization and others like it.

Speaker B: So talk us through what they do, these, you know, they’re just, let’s for argument’s sake say there’s 100 of them, what are they doing?

Speaker E: In the past, we know that by looking at accounts that Twitter and Facebook have made public, They do a couple of things, but mostly what they do is they try to sow division. They push extreme ideas, both on the extreme left and the extreme right, to get us fighting amongst ourselves. It’s in Russia’s best interest for you and I to fight each other and for me to be arguing with my neighbor. So if you look here in the United States at the recent Judge Kavanaugh hearings. We argued about whether or not he would be our Supreme Court Justice for 2 weeks, and a number of different Russian-operated accounts that my colleague Patrick and I were following, they had a lot to say about that. And they pushed extreme arguments on, on that issue. And we think that’s fundamentally because it’s in Russia’s best interest for us to fight about issues like that. Because as long as here in the United States we were fighting about Judge Kavanaugh, we weren’t moving anything else forward. We weren’t making any other policy decisions. And probably more important from the Russians’ perspective, we weren’t paying attention to what Vladimir Putin was doing. And that’s certainly in his best interest.

Speaker B: So in a sense, it’s a bit like that scene in The Hobbit, isn’t it, where the trolls are made to argue amongst themselves by Bilbo, and in the end, because they’re not concentrating, suddenly the sun comes up and turns them to stone.

Speaker E: That’s exactly what the Russians seem to be trying to do. That’s a good analogy, yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, and so people talk about bots and trolling. How does a troll work with a bot?

Speaker E: You know, a lot of people like to make these stark divisions between trolls and bots, and strictly speaking, A bot is an account on a social media platform that is completely operated by a computer. And a troll is an account that’s operated by a human being. A lot of accounts really fall somewhere in between. We call them cyborg accounts, where they’re sometimes operated by a computer that just goes out and retweets other accounts, for instance, or retweets specific content. But then a human operator will occasionally go in and make a comment directed at somebody or make a comment that is very specific around an issue that the IRA or any other organization like them is trying to hype up. Oh, and I should say, when I say the IRA in this case, I mean the Internet Research Agency, not the other IRA. There’s a spectrum between bot and troll. It’s a useful shorthand But in reality, there’s, there’s a lot of space in between in which these types of accounts operate.

Speaker B: So give me an example of a sort of message, because, hey, one of the things that was happening, wasn’t it, was that you have a bot, you’ve got your bots in various different discussion groups, and you pump a message through to that bot, and that bot then repeats it into that message group. What sort of messages are we seeing?

Speaker E: The most basic types of accounts were what we called left trolls and right trolls. Now, the left trolls mostly tweeted about identity politics issues. Many, many of them, in fact, even a lot of recent accounts that we’ve seen have pretended to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement here in the United States. And those accounts will, in one moment, tweet something cute and adorable, a picture of a cute child, a father jump roping with their daughter. They’ll do that in an attempt to get followers and get the trust of the general public. And then in the next moment, they’ll tweet something about how all conservatives are racists. And they’ll, or they will tweet out about how the police can’t be trusted and tweet out about police violence. —so that’s the left trolls. The right trolls focus on very nationalistic issues. They tended to say denigrative things about immigrants, for instance, and they were generally very much in favor of Donald Trump and used a lot of hashtags associated with his candidacy, like #MAGA and that sort of thing. We also identified a couple of other types of accounts. They engaged in early on, several years ago, they tried to create scares around fake events like chemical disasters or the Ebola virus, all of which, you know, weren’t real. They were trying to create scares. They even tried to create some scares around terrorist-associated activity. I think that there’s generally a perception that fake news continues to be the primary problem on social media. And that’s not what we’ve seen with many of the trolls that— certainly the Internet Research Agency trolls and the Iranian trolls, they don’t push fake news. They mostly push real news. Now, sometimes it’s news from less reliable sources, outlets, or certainly, you know, outlets with a particular ideological bent to them. But mostly what they do is they push real news, but they just comment on it. And they try to set the agenda with the news that they share. They only share news that agrees with the perspective that they are trying to tell. Very seldom have we found, do they actually share fake news? And I think the platforms are genuinely getting better at stopping fake news. Certainly Facebook is. They’re not perfect, but they are, they are getting better.

Speaker B: Those trolls are alleged to have manipulated American votes and British ones using data derived from Facebook by Cambridge Analytica. In the US, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is hearing evidence and has already convicted two conspirators, and three other Trump aides have pleaded guilty to his investigators. In the UK, Brexit founder Aaron Banks’ firm and LeaveEU are facing £135,000 fines from the Information Commissioner over data misuse. In the Ukraine, fake news is a normal part of everyday life. The East European country is partly occupied by Russian-backed militia, borders Russia, and is constantly targeted by disinformation. Andreas Lam has just been there on a mission from the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom to train journalists in fact-checking and strengthen their capacity to create true news—quality, independent, and investigative journalism. He says the conflict is actually now reflected in the news.

Speaker F: I would agree that this is a kind of information war, and this is probably, I think, quite a lot of influences from Russia in this information war. And especially in a country like Ukraine, which is— which has a low income and the people, and the— they are very open for all kinds of information. I think this is a very good example for battleground in the field of media war.

Speaker B: So in terms of the experience in Ukraine specifically, how do the journalists feel about all of this? How do they feel about being under a barrage in an information war?

Speaker F: Yeah, the journalists, they are aware of this problem, but they are also a little bit a part of this problem. On the one hand, you have this, you don’t have independent media in Ukraine like we have in Germany, in Great Britain, or in most of the European countries. So the media are owned by politicians, by oligarchs which are very close to Russia. So this means the people have, the journalists have to write whatever their owner would like to, to hear, to read, or to see on the television. So this is the biggest problem. A journalist is not as independent as a journalist like in, in Germany. We had an— right in the days before, we had a study group from Ukraine here in Germany, and they asked us in a very, very serious way, how much does a politician pay the journalists for having an interview. And we were a little bit surprised because you don’t get money from a politician just to have an interview with him. So this is absolutely ridiculous, and it doesn’t— it shows how the journalists depend on politicians and on their meaning. So they are just a part of a propaganda machine, and they are not able to do independent journalistic work.

Speaker B: Okay, so what is the impact of that on people? Do people find it destabilizing, for example? Does it mean that you don’t trust anything that you see or hear?

Speaker F: The general people, they are mostly not even aware of this fake news, though. They, they get the information from the main media outlet, the TV channel, and quite a lot of them have a big influence from Russia and And it’s not that they provide you with fake news on an ongoing basis. They have a quite good mixture. The journalists from Ukraine told me that you have something around 70% news that are true, and then they put the information or the misinformation in between the true information so that the ordinary people, the reader or the people that are watching TV, They don’t even get aware of this kind of fake news. You have to be aware of this. And this is the biggest problem. The people, they think, usually they tell us the truth, but they don’t see this 30% of disinformation or kind of propaganda TV, which give them a different point of view on a certain topic. This is the biggest problem what they have. I think media literacy training would be very helpful for people like this because they don’t be aware of this.

Speaker B: Okay, so what are the concerns of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom regarding fake news?

Speaker F: I think there are two different perspectives out of this. In the general thing is if fake news becomes more and more, not important, but they are becoming the reality for most of the people, then journalism is dying because the journalists, the role of journalism to show problems in a society, to be part of the overall discussion, this part will disappear. So this means the critical role a journalist has will no longer exist. I think the other important part is having a kind of media literacy training to the people that they are getting aware of this. And because if they just follow all the false information, there won’t be— and yet then it’s very complicated to have a democratic system.

Speaker B: Politicians across Europe, perhaps taking their cue from Donald Trump, are are verbally attacking journalists, accusing them of spreading lies and creating a hostile environment. It leads to physical attacks, with journalists being murdered in Malta, Slovakia, and Ukraine, murder attempts in Montenegro. 28 German reporters have been beaten up just this year. 20 Italians are living under 24-hour police protection, and a Romanian politician last week mocked investigative journalists by bringing a suitcase full of donuts to a press conference for them to sell along with their claims about him. A reference to the Romanian phrase for lying, “You’re selling me doughnuts.” And at rallies in the US, Trump supporters can be seen wearing t-shirts with the slogan emblazoned on the back of them, “One journalist, one rope.” So what is true news? Here’s the quiz. 3 questions, all multiple choice answers. Pencils at the ready, fingers on buzzers, no conferring. What will happen to Northern Ireland in Brexit? Will it join the European Union? Will a wall be built to separate it from the Republic? Could there be a hard border but no wall? Or will it suffer the same fate as the UK but then eventually become part of the Customs Union? Which town in California burnt down in a wildfire this week? Was it San Diego? Salem? Paradise? Who has just been appointed the global head of communications for Facebook? Is it Nigel Farage, the former media-savvy champion of UKIP? Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister? Or Jeremy Paxman, everyone’s favourite front room Rottweiler. If you and your family are not sure what’s true and what’s not, you might want to invite the lie detectors to your school, college, or social club. Lie detectors are not police officers armed with polygraphs. They are the brainchild of former financial news journalist Julian von Repart. Bismarck.

Speaker G: What we’re trying to do is we are working with journalists to start a conversation among young people aged 10 to 15 about disinformation, malinformation— we’re not supposed to call it fake news anymore— but the kind of lies that circulate online, and for them to be able to discern the difference between that and a fact, and even that and an opinion, because making the difference between fact and fake is one thing, but then and also being able to navigate the shades of opinion and bias that are circulating online, even from the media, is a really important distinction for them to be able to draw. So very concretely, we train and send journalists, professional journalists, working journalists, into schools to deliver short and memorable and above all interactive classroom sessions, to really wake up the kids to the fact that that, you know, there’s an issue with disinformation, that there’s something one can do about it, that it is something one could care about. It’s not something where we are helpless either. And then really to talk also about the challenges of journalism. And this is why we work with journalists and not just with coaches. We really want journalists to take this opportunity to step away from behind their screens and really interact with this young audience, their next audience, the next generation of readers and viewers and listeners and talk to them about how difficult it is actually to present the truth and how we professional journalists struggle every day to present the truth with limited resources, limited time, reader and audience expectations to take into account. And it’s really through that that we really want to humanize the journalistic process. We also work with games, interactive games, where the kids really experience themselves, for themselves, how easy it is with the very best intentions to put out an article, you know, any piece of writing that with the best of intentions still presents only an incomplete version of the truth. And by doing that, we really want to sensitize them to the fact that there are some things put online for particular purposes to manipulate and to distort and to influence. And then there is such a thing called journalism, which yes, may be flawed and may sometimes be incomplete, but is nonetheless done with a professional mindset and with the ambition to actually inform the citizens. But they’re very young, do they really need to know all this? So we started working only with 14 and 15-year-olds because that’s where we see that children really start making the kind of friendships that last They start to question, they start to make their own worldview. So this for us was a really important point to start this conversation with them. But then the more we went into classrooms and talked to parents and teachers, the more we heard this demand that keeps coming up again and again. Can you do the younger kids? Can you do the younger kids? Can you come into the 5th grade? Now we’re hearing, can you come into the 4th grade? So we found to our surprise that kids are really incredibly well-versed at a very young age. Ofcom recently put out a report that said that in 2017, kids aged 8 to 11, among them 39% own a smartphone. They are watching YouTube, they are on Snapchat. We go into classrooms, we do polls at the beginning of our visits. We ask them to identify what social media platforms they’re on, and you’d be absolutely stunned. They’re on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube. Many of them are even on the age-restricted platforms like Facebook. Some, very few, but some are also on Twitter. So, and they, and they are very aware, and we find this a really, really rewarding age group to work with as well because we don’t name the phenomenon for them. We show them the sort of stuff that they can find online. It’s age-appropriate. It’s not political. We make them vote on it, and then we get them to name it. And by naming it, by letting them name it themselves, they come up with some really interesting words because they don’t call it fake news or propaganda or manipulation. They actually give their own child’s words to the phenomenon. They call it cyberbullying, which they are aware of. They call it clickbait because they all know about YouTube. Kids don’t want to be footballers anymore, or models, or pop stars. They actually want to be YouTubers, and they understand perfectly well that you can make an awful lot of money by putting sensationalist content online. They also, you know, have to navigate this universe of presenting themselves and presenting their friends or their frenemies every day on Snapchat. They will decide whether to put up a flattering or an unflattering photo of their friend or their frenemy. And so they really understand this, the power to manipulate perceptions. And what we’re trying to do, particularly with this age group, is to just tease out their childhood understanding of the internet, of these platforms, which is very sophisticated and much more sort of natural than our relationship. And really to use the vocabulary and the experience and the knowledge that they have from their own childhood world and redirect that to the world of information, to the adult world of information. And once we can do that, it becomes an exercise that’s actually just a reflex for them and shouldn’t actually be frightening and should be very possible.

Speaker B: Passwords Jane Wyatt talking to Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, who is a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Disinformation. Ironically, she is also a distant relative of Baron Otto von Bismarck, who started the Franco-Prussian War by editing the Ems Telegram, a message sent to Bismarck by the Kaiser reporting on a meeting the Kaiser had had with French diplomats. Bismarck’s edit made it appear that the French were making outrageous and insulting demands. Bismarck released the faked evidence to the press and whipped up the war. The expert group had a lot of evidence for 7 weeks, including from Twitter, Facebook, Google, and their critics in the mainstream media. But it stepped away from regulating the tech companies, despite a critical minority report from Reporters Without Borders. This is Password on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. After the High Level Expert Group on Disinformation had done its work, A delegation of MEPs from the Culture Committee went to Silicon Valley to meet the tech giants on their own turf. They came back with an offer of more money for innovative journalism projects and media literacy. Interestingly, the latest research from Poynter in the US and France shows that actually it’s not young people who are in need of media literacy. The under-50s are more likely to know the difference between fact and fiction. And the over-65s are more likely to vote for a candidate or policy even when they know the politician is lying and the policy is based on a false premise. In a new trend, it’s been discovered that younger people are beginning to go to newspaper websites in search of what they consider to be more accurate information. UK MPs investigating fake news have invited Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to come to Britain. They say he should give evidence to an international hearing with parliamentarians from Australia, Canada, Argentina, and Ireland. It’s in London on November 27th. Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg is too busy to attend, and the government has responded to the Media Select Committee’s interim recommendations with a vague reassurance that we regularly engage with Facebook. Many technology experts believe that regulation would be a bad thing, even if it reduces the volume of fake news online. At the Information Technology Innovation Foundation, Daniel Castro is convinced that governments should stay out of the tech space because the laws that exist are out of date and no longer relevant.

Speaker A: As you said, the laws haven’t changed. What’s changed is who’s necessarily the publisher and the speaker in this case. The newspapers were clearly the speakers. In the past, they were the publishers. They were responsible for the content, and there was significantly less content. The way that a lot of these internet platforms are designed, they are in fact platforms, not publishers. And there’s an important distinction there in that they’re enabling voices of users to engage in direct speech, direct commerce, direct interactions. And so if you want to make the platform’s liable for the conduct and activity of the users, you do run into serious problems because, you know, these platforms can’t scale globally if they’re going to be maintaining a, you know, responsibility. If they’re being held responsible for the content of the users, they’re going to have to limit what users do on there.

Speaker B: But some people would say that they shouldn’t be allowed to scale globally if they can’t meet that responsibility. Let’s face it, Newspapers have got that built-in sanction already there because they know what is libelous, and if they want to scale, to use that word, they just sell more copies and they’ve already sorted out the problem at heart.

Speaker A: Well, the amount of interactions that occur on these platforms doesn’t work, and I agree that some people probably would say, well, we’d be better off without social networks or without platforms to trade digitally around the world, but I don’t I think, you know, on net, when we talk about the net benefits, they exist there. And so the question is, well, can we start targeting these problems? Can we start modifying these platforms to address some of these concerns? I think that’s where the conversation is right now, where you have a lot of these social networks or other platforms engaged in more productive conversations today about how can they be responsive to specific concerns, whether it’s fake news, terrorist threats, things like revenge porn that are being shared, and figuring out how they can address these types of problems on their own and where they need government support. But I don’t think it’s simply a question of saying, well, if you make the platforms liable for all the conduct, that that will solve the problem, because what it will likely do is it will likely simply force certain platforms to either shut down or shut down services that on net are probably benefiting users. Because if they’re responsible for what happens, then they’re simply not going to offer certain services. What— the way the system’s set up now, where you have this intermediary liability protection in place, you can allow platforms to have some knowledge of malicious conduct. And the reason that’s helpful is because if they know about it, then they can fix it. But if the standard is if they know about it, they’re liable for the conduct, then they simply want to have a willful ignorance. They don’t want to know what’s happening because that’s better off for them. And so countries that have started looking at these issues, it’s much better to have the platforms working in partnership with government and civil society on fixing these problems than to tell them you’re better off hiding from the problem because that way you won’t be responsible.

Speaker B: Okay, but why is it, do you think, that governments are beginning to focus in on these tech giants?

Speaker A: Well, I think they’re an easy target right now in, in many cases. I think in some cases there’s legitimate problems, and those two end up being conflated together. I mean, we’re seeing this right now in the United States where you’re seeing attacks on platforms from both the extreme right and the extreme left, and they’re making different arguments, but collectively it’s resulting in large-scale anger towards a lot of these tech companies, or what’s seen as kind of big tech. The issues are very diverse, and again, as I said, I think there’s a lot of reasons why they end up becoming easy targets, and that’s why you see so much outrage directed at many of these platforms. But the main difference here, I think, is compared to in the past with a newspaper publisher or maybe some other kind of medium, is that consumers benefit from scale on these platforms. When people go onto Facebook and they want to share information with their friends, they want to share something once. They don’t want to go on 5 different social networks. There is benefit to having one social network for work connections on LinkedIn, one social network for microblogging on Twitter. There’s a benefit from that, and that’s why these platforms are so successful and are scaling well, and people tend to gravitate to one. You can say break it up, but in the digital environment, that just doesn’t work as well because of the way you have these network effects on these platforms. And so the regulatory solutions, it’s not a question of saying, well, we need to have a purely libertarian approach towards big tech, which is what I think some people said in the ’90s, and that was wrong. It’s not that these companies aren’t going to be regulated. They are going to be regulated. They’re going to have to abide by rules just like everybody else. But you can’t apply 20th century rules to a 21st century economy.

Speaker B: British Chancellor Philip Hammond, has stated in his budget that he would tax the big tech companies. He says that they’ve been avoiding tax in the countries in which they operate, and that by doing so in the UK, he would be able to raise £400 million from them for media literacy, among other things. Though the tax will not come into force until 2020. Joe Stevens MP, one of the media’s Select Committee Stortz believes that much more should be done.

Speaker C: Well, we issued our interim report in July of this year as a Select Committee, and we called for regulation based on what we have uncovered during our year-long inquiry into data breaches, breaches of privacy, the evidence that suggests that there has been interference facilitated by tech company platforms into elections here, a referendum here, and in elections in other countries across the world. So we feel that the time for self-regulation is over, and it’s now up to our government here in the UK, preferably with other governments either across Europe or globally, to put in place a system of regulation to prevent the these sorts of things happening again.

Speaker B: But in America, there’s been quite a lot of opposition to this and to statements by Philip Hammond that there should be a levy on the technology companies. A lot of people have said this is going to stifle innovation. What do you think about that?

Speaker C: I don’t think it will stifle innovation. I mean, the fact is, at the moment, they are the only element of what you could broadly call media which have no regulation whatsoever. In the UK. So our print media is regulated, our broadcast media is regulated. The platforms, the tech platforms, argue that they are not publishers, so they shouldn’t be regulated. But in fact, they do act essentially as hybrid publishers because they do exercise some editorial control over the content on their platforms. So not only are they not regulated at all, they— because of the nature in which, in the way in which they’re structured, there are all sorts of issues around tax, around regulation, around how cross-jurisdictional regulation might work. That doesn’t need to stifle innovation, but I think, you know, if you were watching our committee hearing this week when we had the Information Commissioner, who is the regulator in the UK, giving evidence, she was very clear. She said that the time for self-regulation is over. The tech companies have proved that they can’t self-regulate adequately or at all, so it’s time for government to step in. That’s been the view that we’ve reached on the committee.

Speaker B: But the argument that the tech companies put together is this is impossible. There’s just too much content for them to be able to go through, and that if they do, the result will be onerous.

Speaker C: But there is already regulation going on in some areas. So for example, community standards standards around hate speech and hate content. Both— two examples— Facebook and Twitter have community guidelines, so they effectively regulate content because they do take down, through a process that isn’t perfect, but they do take down some content themselves. So it’s not good enough just to say this is too difficult, this is too complicated.

Speaker B: But in spite of all those strong arguments and innovative suggestions, like a truth hygiene rating. The government has not accepted most of the recommendations from the Select Committee on Fake News, and the committee is continuing to hear that all-important evidence. One of the many reasons why ministers said that they would not act now to regulate the tech companies is because of the Cairncross Review. Dame Frances Cairncross is reviewing the future sustainability of British quality journalism. What you might call true news. But I’ve been talking to the editor of the newspaper’s newspaper, the UK Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford, and he too blames the tech companies for the crisis in the news industry.

Speaker H: Just because they’ve been, you know, incredibly successful at hoovering up most of the money that’s spent on online advertising in the UK. So if you look at the sort of £10 billion billion plus a year which is spent on digital advertising in the UK. Most of that money goes to Facebook and Google.

Speaker B: And one of the things many people say, look at Facebook, look at Google, and they’ve got no interest at all in journalism, have they?

Speaker H: No, they’re very interested in it. So Google in particular would be a very dull place if it didn’t have any journalistic content on there. If you search for pretty much anything, news articles are among the things that appear near the top. It might be, maybe that’s the things I’m searching for, but certainly an awful lot of journalistic content on Google. Google are very engaged with the news industry in ensuring, you know, that stays there. And from the news industry’s point of view, Google’s where they get most of their, most publications get most of their traffic. So they’re incredibly reliant on them from that point of view. And similar with Facebook, isn’t it? I mean, I think if you weren’t anywhere who goes on Facebook, who scrolls through it, you know, you get— it would again be a reasonably dull place if it wasn’t for the, I think, if it wasn’t for the sort of professionally produced content that ends up on there.

Speaker B: But you’re making the point though that that professionally produced content doesn’t actually get paid for. That’s the issue, isn’t it? We seem to be in this terrible position. Paul Dacre was talking only the other day about the number of newspapers in the UK having halved over the last decade from 11 million to 5 million.

Speaker H: In terms of sales, yeah, daily newspaper sales I think he was talking about. Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, the money, you know, has been draining away from the journalism industry and into the coffers of Google and Facebook, I would say. I would say they’ve got a moral responsibility to do something about that as kind of just as responsible sort of citizens, really, corporate citizens. But also there’s self-interest there because professionally produced journalism very much enriches their platforms and helps them make more money.

Speaker B: It does enrich their platforms, but there’s another issue here, isn’t there, which is that that professionally produced journalism actually is of great value to local communities, and it’s that that’s going, isn’t it? Because it’s not actually being replaced. That content, that holding to account of local officials, that search for corruption, that’s not there any longer, is it?

Speaker H: Well, it’s still there. I mean, we’ve still got, you know, a great many local newspapers, but I’d say probably over the last 10 years, at least half the local newspaper journalists there were 10 years ago have gone, you know. So there might have been probably more than 10,000, I’d say, local newspaper journalists a decade years ago. I’d say there’s less than 5,000 now. So the industry’s under an awful lot of pressure, and there’s, you know, there’s just less. That has a severe impact on communities, especially the ones on the fringes that no longer have professional journalists covering them anymore. So people literally just don’t know what’s going on, or they probably rely on kind of Facebook and social social media to kind of know what’s going on. But that means nothing’s ever verified, you know, it’s just rumor, isn’t it? And, um, no one’s actually picking up the phone and holding people to account, investigating things.

Speaker B: The theory is that the very business model that the tech companies use actually incentivizes startling claims, exaggerations, extreme opinions. When a post goes viral, its value to advertisers increases hugely. This is how unemployed young men in a small town in northern Macedonia were able to buy themselves fancy cars by creating political fake news in the 2016 American presidential election. The business model rests on data, and it’s not abstract data. It’s our real choices, whether we click Click, swipe, or scroll—everything counts. Some evidence was produced this week to suggest that consumers have woken up to this fact, and they don’t like it. Software company Privitar did a survey in France, Britain, and the US of some 2,000 people and found that on average 90% of consumers believe technological advances pose a risk to their data privacy, and 77% believe it is the responsibility of technology organizations to make clear the purpose of their data use. Prevatar’s CEO Jason Dupree believes this is a warning that a digital backlash may be coming.

Speaker D: I think, I think the, the opportunity afforded through the use of data is enormous and significant for society. And, you know, we cannot ignore that. We need to embrace that opportunity. So I don’t think for a minute we would suggest that this, you know, we shouldn’t make use of these incredibly valuable datasets. They enable organizations to provide better service, to create better products. We can use really rich datasets like patient health records to improve clinical care and develop cures for new diseases. The opportunities are endless. I think the point is that there are multiple ways to accomplish these objectives, and the right way to do it is to, to do so in a way that maintains the confidence that consumers and data subjects have in the data ecosystem.. And to ensure that we build into these systems the safeguards and the controls that protect that, you know, sensitive information, that protect individual privacy. Because we can still accomplish the same objective at the end of the day. There’s just a good, right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. And in order to build a sustainable, long-term, ecosystem around data, that is absolutely essential. And any system or ecosystem or product or company that doesn’t pay attention to this, you know, I believe will not be sustainable in the long term. There’ll be a natural drift away from it. The most fundamental change is the sudden availability of huge amounts of structured, high-quality data, largely attributable to the fact that we We all carry very sophisticated sensing devices around with us in our pockets in the forms of a mobile phone. And I think that has caused a fundamental shift in the power that we can derive from these datasets. So I think there does need to be a rebalancing exercise. And I think we do need to stand back and take a careful look at this because things are moving very, very quickly and we are setting up this ecosystem now for the next decade.

Speaker B: In the next 10 years, some commentators expect digital products to eclipse printed newspapers and magazines completely. Earlier this year, the Washington Post warned that as print newspapers die, so too does democracy. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re trying to sell papers. Readers. In the UK, Professor Neil Thurman of LMU University in Munich has found that when The Independent switched to digital only, it was a disaster. In 2017, its print readers were reading each edition for between 37 and 50 minutes, but the online readers of The Independent spent only 6 minutes a month with the paper. But then, is any of this so new? Fake news has been around since time immemorial, according to Commodore Patrick Tyrrell, an intelligence and cyber expert. According to him, all that we’ve done is take away the gatekeepers, and citizen journalists unfortunately need professional editors. Even Facebook is finding that.

Speaker I: One tribe probably said to a neighboring tribe, there is no game down in that valley knowing that there was. It’s how, how do these messages give you the upper hand. And certainly positive deception, fake news at its ultimate, has always been here. So essentially then, it’s disinformation deception, we’re talking about something that armies have practiced, states have practiced forever. Give us a few examples. What do you think is a very good example of this sort of deception? Well, I think that, um, if you look at how it’s been used, let’s say, by the good guys, there was an Operation Fortitude in the Second World War war, which was part of an overall deception strategy to try to persuade the Germans that there would be an attack at the Pas-de-Calais and Norway rather than, as they decided to do, to attack the Normandy beaches. And they launched a huge British deception operation. They invented a new British army, they invented a new American corps, they had dummy landing craft, they had dummy tanks, dummy aircraft, and they had a very comprehensive set of signals going backwards and forwards between these fictitious entities showing how troops were being marshalled and moved round. Okay, so that, I mean, that’s, that’s fine, isn’t it? Because in that example, you’ve actually got somebody who was duped, and there is an aim to the, the exercise, and that was to win a war. With what Putin is doing at the moment, say for example, of the absolute denial of what went on in Salisbury What is the value of that for him? Because everybody in Britain thinks that the Russians did it. Why is he denying? Why is he saying that they didn’t do it? Putin has an objective to sow discourse and dissent amongst the Western nations. He doesn’t like the idea of NATO. He doesn’t like the constraints pressure to put upon Russia, whether it be from sanctions or from other means. And what he wants to do, and in particular these sort of rather inept spy assassination attempts, he doesn’t mind that they appear to us to be inept because that sows uncertainty in the West as to what Putin and his team are going to do next. So in those terms then, cyber must be a godsend to the Russians because it’s extended their reach, it’s allowed them to get to more people, it’s allowed them to get more out of less. Well, it does, because of course, I mean, the thing that has changed since Operation Fortitude and a number of other examples of deception. The thing that has changed is that very quickly you can get this information to a huge number of people. Some of them, of course, in bot factories in Moscow or St. Petersburg will promulgate it round the web in bots and tweets and messages around. That of course if you say something often enough, it must be true.

Speaker B: Now, enough of fakes. Here’s the Transparency Report. Joe Stevens is the Labour MP for Cardiff Central. The Labour Party held its own fake news inquiry in 2016. Pat Tyrell is an old friend a friend of mine. I’ve known him for years. I’ve been pitching ideas for technology features to Paul Dacre’s former newspaper stablemate, the Mail Online. Jane Wyatt works part-time for the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, which is partly funded by the EU Commission. And Jane is a trained lie detectors classroom journalist. The Lie Detectors Project has turned down offers from big tech companies and political foundations and relies on a grant from an American philanthropic society, the Wyss Foundation. The transparency ting was created by Password producer Blue Buffery in her very own kitchen. None of us gets paid for making Password as Resonance FM is a community radio station funded by your generous donations and an Arts Council grant. Now, how did you get on in the quiz? What will happen to Northern Ireland in Brexit? Well, and this is what’s getting the DUP very hot under the collar, initially there could be a hard border. But eventually, what could happen is that Northern Ireland could be part of the Customs Union and really have a very similar role to the one it has at the moment. But that will make it very different to the rest of the UK. Which town in California burnt down in a wildfire this week? Paradise. It had to be. And who has become the global head of communications at Facebook? Well, it’s Nick Clegg, the students’ favorite. That’s all for this month. You can find more true news at our website, Future Intelligence, and sign up for the newsletter too. Thanks for listening.

Speaker A: Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.