Roadmap “Communication on fake news and online misinformation”
Roadmaps and inception impact assessments describe the scope, purpose and timing of new laws and policies. They also set out plans for evaluations of existing laws or ‘fitness checks’ of multiple laws. Further, roadmaps aim to inform stakeholders about the Commission’s work to allow them to provide feedback and to participate effectively in future consultation activities.
The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (Commission of the European Communities CEC) asked for views on its Roadmap to “Communication on fake news and online misinformation” by 8 December 2017. The feedback can be found on
http://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/initiatives/ares-2017-5489364
This posting is an extended version to my feedback on CEC’s roadmap “Communication on fake news and online misinformation”.
Noble Lies, Fictions and Fake News
There is scholarly debate about the purpose and context of Plato’s ‘noble lie’ or ‘magnificent myth’ but broadly speaking it is the myth which Socrates proposes to tell the people to justify the tripartite state and the rule of the Guardians.
Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. [Plato, The Republic. Book III]
In my other reference, the wily patrician, Menenius proposes to stale a little further, an old tale, which justifies patrician rule over the plebeians.
I shall tell you
A pretty tale: it may be you have heard it;
But, since it serves my purpose, I will venture
To stale ‘t a little more. [Shakespeare; Coriolanus I/i/91-4]
Over the centuries, constructs or “fictions” have been used to authorize a particular political system or world view; even modern democratic thought rests on such a construct – the idea of a social contract. Whilst English social contract theory begins in Thomas Hobbes with a version of Menenius’s pretty tale, as it evolves in Locke and Mill it becomes the foundation of what we like to call liberal democracy – a far cry from its Hobbesian roots.
If Menenius had had access to modern media he might have delivered a Party Political Broadcast, but if the tribunes had had access to social media then Coriolanus might never have become Consul. But “there is nothing new under the sun,” [Ecclesiastes 1.9] and the presentation of myths or fictions to justify the social order is not new. However social media has an open access which means that the establishment and its elites are no longer the guardians of the magnificent myth and the lie is now more often ignoble than noble. As Socrates intended, the story can create a whole world view and today the world views created by lies, noble and otherwise, can be riddled with conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’.
The problem which is now often missed, and is missed by the European Commission’s Roadmap, is that fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories are intensely powerful. Plato knew this; Shakespeare knew it. Hence it isn’t enough simply to counter fake news by presenting the facts. This presumes an audience which actually wants to seek the facts, and to be informed, rather than one which wants to be entertained by clever conspiracy theories and to endorse a world view which is independent of the facts. There are many participants in social media who do not care for facts – they have been trained not to do so by generations of political leaders delivering their own ‘myths’ and ‘pretty tales’.
Therefore the question we have to ask is on a meta-level. What is it in the human psyche that makes us vulnerable to fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories? The subject was well explored in The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1977 [Lipset & Raab, Phoenix Books 1978]. For the radical right then as now, the world was a simple place and problems had simple solutions (Simplism). If the solutions are simple, why do political leaders not resolve political problems? Simple answer: because they are part of a conspiracy.
Strategies to counter the radical right (and left for that matter) are a key task for the Road Map. Other conspiracy theories and simplism may be less overtly political and more about marketing and making money; alternative medicine frequently appeals to a world view where medical challenges are easy to address and the pharmaceutical companies create difficulties to make money. Victims of this worldview are encouraged to spend vast sums on quackery and yet the purveyors of ‘alternative medicine’ are often able to achieve some fake status as the moral superiors to the scientists they claim are in league with the drug manufacturers.
Religious beliefs can also be built on such ‘magnificent myths’ or fictions; Seven Day Creationists for example, are not much interested in the presentation of evidence to the contrary; for them, God made the fossils and carbon-dating is an invention of the devil to test us. Many of those who hold to political world-views, hold them in a similar way. Nothing will count as evidence against them.
Countering fake news in a democracy of course rather depends on what you mean by ‘democracy’. Many so called democracies, such as the erstwhile German Democratic Republic or the Democratic Republic of Congo, are themselves rooted in their own lie or myth. In practice, used in isolation the term ‘democracy’ is unhelpful. But so called western liberal democracies embrace a degree of egalitarianism which contains the seeds of their own downfall.
The belief that everyone’s opinion is valid, justified or not, supported or not, argued or not, informed or not, is the way they facilitate the exchange of fake news, alternative facts, conspiracy theories and simplism. We might do better to focus not on the term ‘democracy’ but on the term ‘liberal’. As Karl Popper (1988) argued, theoretical arguments about the nature of democracy are not particularly useful in creating an Open Society.
The tragedy of our age is surely the fact that the term ‘liberal’ has been devalued, and at worst corrupted into a new ideology we call ‘neo liberal’, which is neither new nor liberal.
How is this to be challenged?
Changing public opinion is not very realistic. But we could begin with leaders and opinion formers. In particular political and civil leaders need to be educated to understand the dangers. Members of Parliament need to be reminded of Burke’s famous dictum;
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
Political leaders need to be taught the difference between ‘liberal democracy’ and majoritarianism. There needs to be greater understanding of what a parliament is and what it means to be a member of a parliament in a representative democracy.
The term ‘direct democracy’ is a lie which is neither noble nor magnificent, for it entails a contradiction: it cannot be both ‘direct’ and ‘democratic’ for only through a parliament can the conflicting views of the ‘demos’ be synthesized and reflected in governance. We also need an understanding of pluralism and checks and balances.
Whilst we might want ultimate sovereignty to lie with an elected Government, there must be strong forces at work to balance that power; an independent judiciary and police; a diverse and independent media; a non-partisan education system, equality under the law and there also need to be appropriate social and welfare provisions. Liberal societies protect minority rights and cannot ever be majoritarian dictatorships.
The Roadmap informs us that “Access to reliable information is at the heart of what makes an effective democracy.” The moral neutrality of the term ‘effective’ here is bothersome. A majoritarian dictatorship could be ‘effective’ by some criteria and those who equate ‘democracy’ with majority rule might well be able to create a very ‘effective’ state (for example in utilitarian or economic terms – those which F R Leavis used to call Technologico-Benthamite) but it would not be a very liberal one. The same paragraph moves from “inaccurate information” to “the spread of fake news” without noticing it and then moves on to suggest that the weakening of the traditional “news industry” has “adverse effects on the quality of the democratic debate across the EU.”
It is not clear what the adjective “democratic” is doing here and quite what it is supposed to mean – debates happen in democracies that is for sure, or they ought to, but more often than not the term ‘democratic’ is now used to shut down debate – for example in the claim that Brexit is the “democratic will of the people” (by which is meant the majority of those choosing to vote) and therefore the debate is over. Democracy when used to justify majoritarianism is certainly not used to encourage debate; quite the reverse.
Much of the second paragraph exploring the nature of fake news is entirely sound and well argued. However, it is weak on “state sponsored propaganda intended to cause harm to citizens by hindering their possibilities to make informed choices and to harm society by disrupting the democratic state.” This is indeed a major challenge for the European liberal democracies but it is one which again needs a meta-level approach.
State sponsored misinformation and propaganda directed against our countries and our societies is a feature of warfare; it is conducted by our enemies which now include the Russian government of Mr Putin. It is disingenuous to approach this problem in the abstract as if this is simply another feature of social media. It is in fact a product of a new kind of warfare which grew out of the Cold War. Approaching it as purely a matter of disinformation, whilst at the same time doing business as usual with the enemy state, is bizarre. It is not credible to recognise and seek to address the work of the Kremlin in seeking to destabilise western states and simultaneously to support European Governments which want business as usual. The Commission cannot at once tell European citizens that an enemy state is seeking to wage an information war against them and simultaneously maintain a posture of neutrality. This kind of hypocrisy is the food the conspiracy theorists feed from; there is simply a danger of doing more harm than good.
This illustrates the danger of treating the dissemination of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ as a social pathology in itself rather than as a symptom of more fundamental underlying forces. Not only must we create the means to counter misinformation and propaganda, we must also seek to understand and address the conditions under which it thrives. In a sense this means we must indeed articulate to the public our own magnificent myth.
I do not think Menenius’s tale would be very effective today in convincing working people that the rulers care for them like fathers; but that is the nature of the challenge to show citizens that political leaders care for them at least as much as they care for themselves.