The political traps embedded in the fight against fake news
The decision of the Brazilian federal government to join the campaign against the spread of fake news on social networks at the internet hides some political pitfalls that could cause serious political damage to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, due to the complexity of the issue and the difficulty to reach an unambiguous solution.
In fact, the main arena of the fight against fake news is located mainly in the media as well as in the political sphere, both very susceptible to disinformation. The executive branch faces a very risky task trying to control the rapid expansion of fake news because it lacks the knowledge and experience to deal with such an issue. It’s a brand new problem that so far has been mainly studied at the university level.
The phenomenon of false, incomplete, distorted or out-of-context news is already quite old. We have lived with it for more than a century, a period in which it manifested itself through newspapers, magazines, radio news and television news. Fake news, however, went almost unnoticed because pre-internet journalistic communication was controlled by a small group of large companies, mostly private.
With the arrival of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), at the end of the 20th century, virtual social networks emerged, which began to compete with the conventional press in the production of information flows offered to the population. The competition turned into a battle for survival as advertisers migrated to the virtual space, especially after cell phones facilitated access to large virtual networks like Facebook and Google.
It is in this context that the controversy about how to fight fake news arises, basically as an issue maneuvered by the conventional press to try to build an image of credibility amidst the information chaos created by extremist political groups in the flow of news on the internet. If the press were ethically committed to the veracity of the information published until the arrival of the internet, it would have already made a mea culpa of all the distorted, biased and half-truths published in the analogic era as part of the corporate game of political and business interests.
The political-advertising offensive against social networks takes on the characteristics of a maneuver by large media conglomerates interested in using the banner of combating fake news as a weapon against the accelerated financial expansion of technological empires such as Facebook and Google. It is a “big dog” war and whoever gets involved in it needs to be very clear that if the commitment to the reliability of the news is taken to the last consequences, it may end up having to face both the networks and business groups such as the big metropolitan news empires.
Virtual social networks are far from being models of conduct in terms of commitment to truthfulness. Quite the opposite. The fact that they gathered audiences infinitely larger than those of the conventional press, that they took advantage of the ubiquity of cell phones and that they allowed instantaneity in the simultaneous transmission of thousands of messages, made Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp the preferred platforms. of online terrorists and extremists. Fake news also became the preferred weapon of political extremists like Donald Trump, in the US, and Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil.
Sophisticated speech
The effort to fight fake news is urgent and necessary, but it needs to take into account the social-economic-political context in which we are inserted, the technological specificities of virtual news flows and the resources we have to achieve the objective. The first contextual observation is the infeasibility of fighting digital problems with analogue tools. It won’t work or it will only serve to deceive public opinion. In the physical space of newspapers, radio and TV, there are localized and identifiable people who can be legally charged. In the so-called cyberspace, Every responsibility is diffuse, changeable and complex.
It took us decades to produce laws, codes, regulations and norms trying to discipline the news activity of the press, without completely eliminating the incidence of false or distorted news in conventional newspapers, radio and TV stations. Companies built a sophisticated discourse to adapt journalism to the commercial environment in the production and dissemination of information. More than that, the media formatted audiences that, without critical judgment, incorporated several items of disinformation as undisputed issues.
Suddenly, all these changes with the information glut generated by the internet and technological innovations such as cell phones, computers, databases and, more recently, robots and artificial intelligence. A space without rules and without consolidated values was created. The slow and complex system of producing laws and regulations cannot keep up with the frantic pace of technological innovation. Many new laws became obsolete and ineffective even before they were passed. And more than anything, it is starting to become obvious that the creation of norms will depend more on people than on courts, parliaments or governments.
This becomes clear when analyzing the work of hundreds of information verification projects, a commendable effort to try to limit the proliferation of fake news through its deconstruction. It is humanly impossible to check all data and facts published in a normal weekday edition of printed newspapers. Detecting the most blatant lies is feasible, but bias, decontextualization and half-truths require much more time and knowledge to identify. Furthermore, experience has shown that the editorial space dedicated to publishing the results of checks is much less than that dedicated to publishing general news. The result is that checking facts and data, also known by the jargon fact checking, ends up serving more for newspaper or magazine marketing than to reassure or guide the reader.
It’s a social task
Thus, the government’s entry into the fight against fake news needs to take into account this whole arsenal of difficulties capable of creating disappointments, setbacks and accusations in an issue that, in the end, has more chances of being resolved by people and communities than by decrees and laws. Instead of seeking to standardize the problem, the government may have more chances to succeed if it bets on public campaigns to raise awareness and encourage the emergence of new values and behaviours in dealing with the news.
Dealing with information and news is not something you practice based on manuals or rules. Each piece of information or news is related to a specific context, a particular reality and an individual worldview. The global cases can indeed be framed as laws, but in people’s daily lives, the fight against false, distorted or incomplete news is a matter of attitude, of values incorporated into each individual’s worldview. These are conducts, ideally, almost automated, such as the awareness that a burn caused by fire is something painful. Our reaction is automatic, nobody needs to teach us not to put our hands in the fire.
There are no ready-made recipes for combating fake news and this is precisely why government action is very risky in this field. Executive authorities cannot fall into the trap of wanting to present definitive and universal solutions to those who demand immediate results.
