Two PDF files will come to define the state of the West’s political landscape, circa 2018: the US Department of Justice’s indictment of twelve Russian intelligence agents for hacking the 2016 presidential election; and the British House of Commons’ interim report on disinformation and fake news, published this week. Whether their effect will be comparable at all is hard to tell.
They are two very different documents, for tone, scope, and language. What connects them is their subject matter: how technology has been weaponised — by foreign powers, culture warriors, reckless mercenaries, and careless technologists — to disrupt elections in multiple countries. The DOJ’s document is a fast-paced spy story, where spooks shoot about cryptocurrency to rent servers, steal the Clinton campaign's emails, and turn them over to Wikileaks – a digital transparency champion hijacked to do the bidding of shadowy agents.
The British report reads, fittingly, more like a Lewis Carroll’s tale: the 12-people parliamentary committee on Digital, Culture, Media & Sport have stepped into a rabbit hole, and now they cannot help meeting with an ensemble cast of friends, foes and helpers, burrowing deeper and deeper with each encounter. In perfect Carrollian fashion, it all started with a question of semantics: “what does ‘fake news’ mean?”
When the DCMS committee launched its inquiry in early 2017, that was a question worth asking. The election that had ensconced Donald Trump in the White House had seen the online discourse dominated by Pizzagate — a conspiracy theory maintaining that Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring from a pizzeria in Washington, DC — and by a galaxy of sham news sites spouting pro-Trump balderdash.
“What interested us in the start was: is this just teenagers in Macedonia messing around to make money, or is this something more sophisticated and sinister, such as Russia's involvement?,” said the committee's chair, conservative MP Damian Collins.
Inevitably, the worse alternative turned out to be the case. Expert witnesses provided evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, the role of social media came to the fore, and a succession of whistleblowers appeared, alleging that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had misused Facebook data to psychologically targeted voters in the UK and the US. “The focus of our inquiry moved from understanding the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, distributed largely through social media, to issues concerning the very future of democracy,” the report reads.
The MPs realised that the defining trait of “fake news” — a term eventually rejected by the committee, which now prefers “misinformation” or “disinformation” — is not their fakeness. Lies, propaganda and Russian dezinformatsiya are nothing new; to be new is the way social media allows for mendacious or partisan content to be published unchallenged, and to be tailored to whet specific audiences’ doubts, fears, and biases. The question has therefore become: are Facebook et al. “platforms” — free-for-all containers of unmoderated content —, or are they “publishers”, responsible for policing their networks and keeping them clean from underhanded political ads and state-sponsored lies?
The report’s most relevant conclusions stem from that question. The committee recommends that the government comes up with a new category — something in between publisher and platform — that would make tech companies liable for not removing harmful content promptly. “Tech companies provide a curated space for content: think of YouTube's next up suggestion, or the way Facebook's feed shows updates in a non-chronological order,” Collins said. “If it curates that space, Facebook has a responsibility.”
The document also deals with the problem of “dark ads”: political advertisements on social media targeted to be only visible to their intended audience, eluding the scrutiny of fact-checkers and journalists. Some of the micro-targeted ads deployed on Facebook by the official Vote Leave campaign ahead of the EU Referendum were just revealed this week. They included posts claiming that the EU was about to ban tea kettles (false), or that it was blocking the UK’s ability to protect polar bears (grossly misleading).
To counter similar abuses, the committee proposes the creation of a “public register [...] requiring all political advertising work to be listed for public display”, and allowing authorities and voters to check who is paying for all the messages posted online. Similar proposals have been floated in the past by the fact-checking organisation Full Fact, and the author and researcher Jamie Bartlett.
The report is as much an indictment of technology companies’ opacity as it is of Britain’s unpreparedness in the face of digital skullduggery. It warns that the country's electoral law “is not fit for purpose for the digital age, and needs to be amended to reflect new technologies”. The UK’s imminent exit from the EU — and, consequently, its data protection regime GDPR — could well result in a rerun of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, unless the government plugs the upcoming loophole.
Oversight bodies, including the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office, lack resources, and the powers to impose sanctions worth their name: when the ICO punished Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica data breach, two weeks ago, it could only inflict a laughable £500,000 fine — although maximum fines have now been increased. The organisation also struggles to attract technically proficient employees, a predicament the Committee proposes to solve by asking technology companies to pay a tax to better fund the ICO.
A sense of powerlessness in the face of manipulation and abuse runs through each of the document’s 89 pages — and it is certainly something the committee had to deal with itself over the course of this inquiry. The import of some of the revelations made during the committee’s over sixty sessions goes well beyond the brief of a parliamentary committee: it includes foreign interference, corporate arrogance, and the actions of the people gravitating around the cloudy Cambridge Analytica-SCL-AIQ blob, a moneyed clique who have already launched a new company, Emerdata, helmed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
Unsurprisingly, Collins said that he hopes someone else — the security services, law enforcement agencies, or even a Robert Mueller-like figure — will take over the most problematic bits of the committee's investigation. If anything, because such a figure would have the power to force witnesses to give evidence, and impose sanctions on those who lie or make a mockery of the inquiry.
In contrast, the DCMS committee’s sanctioning powers are largely symbolic, a fact many have taken advantage of to flout the MPs’ requests: Facebook equivocated for months before finally accepting to fly its CTO Mike Schroepfer to London for a session studded of “I don’t know” and non-answers (Mark Zuckerberg has ignored repeated requests to give evidence); Leave.EU’s donor Arron Banks walked out mid-session to grab a bite with friends; Vote Leave’s campaign director Dominic Cummings has refused to appear before the Committee for months, and on Friday he spitefully leaked the report two days before its intended publication.
The committee has also limited itself to questioning the techies and consultants that helped plutocrats and ideologues hack the political system: the names of Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon pop up tremendously often in the report, but the guys never popped up in the committee room; the twelve angry MPs pour a lot of scorn upon Banks and Cummings, but there is little mention of their political associates Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. It is unlikely that a British Robert Mueller would leave those stones unturned.
Right now, though, there is no evidence that the government is taking any step to entrust the investigation to better equipped authorities. The prime minister and the committee’s chair have never had a one-on-one conversation about the inquiry’s findings, and so far the government has made no statement about officially investigating Russian interference. The unpreparedness that plunged Britain down the fake news rabbit hole is still to be addressed.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
