> A new menace: Disinformation—false information spread deliberately to deceive people—helped distort elections in 26 of the 30 countries studied that had national votes in the last year.
Describing disinformation as a “new menace” seems like... well, disinformation. I would assume that disinformation has reared its head in just about every election in history.
I think disinfoRmation has been around since the time before the Pyramids. Instant global reach of disinfo is newer. “What is true is not printed and what is printed is not true” — I think we would do well to read more books and less of what passes for “news.”
The problem with unregulated US-style definition of "freedom of speech" is that this definition only works with (and it was designed with) the 17th to 20th century media model, with newspapers, radio stations and later-on TV stations as "gatekeepers" to ensure that extremism (no matter if it's Nazism, ordinary conspiracy theories or quackery such as MMS/homeopathy/antivaxx) doesn't get too much reach.
With the Internet, this gatekeeper model got turned on its head - and the village idiots peddling bullshit suddenly had a worldwide audience with Facebook and, even worse, discussion forums in where they radicalized each other. The results are known by now - measles have a happy time again "thanks" to anti-vaxxers, the US elected someone to Presidency who by all measures is unfit for this post, generally right-wing and racist rhetoric is spreading across the world, and world leaders reproduce conspiracy theories from the darkest corners of 4chan. In India, people have been lynched "thanks" to virally spreading lies. The Brexit "referendum" was only decided "thanks" to lies and propaganda of questionable financial origins.
Now, the problem is that at least in the US and in large parts of Western societies the law was way too slow to catch up to the threats that the Internet created/made possible. Some countries (e.g. China, North Korea, Iran, Russia) went full-on censorship mode, some like Germany (NetzDG) tried to catch up, and the US is all but incapable of doing anything with the Congressional gridlock. Which is the root cause of the problem that the article states... and it's bad news for the world, as countries will try their own way of "fixing" social media and overreaching as a result.
Extremism and quackery got plenty of exposure in the 17th to 20th century "media model". Even anti-free-speech attitudes themselves are not new. There's nothing new under the sun.
If anything, the extremism and quackery of today are far milder than those of the past - even the relatively-recent past. The wisdom of crowds is self-correcting, if allowed to self-correct.
> The problem with unregulated US-style definition of "freedom of speech" is that this definition only works with (and it was designed with) the 17th to 20th century media model, with newspapers, radio stations and later-on TV stations as "gatekeepers" to ensure that extremism (no matter if it's Nazism, ordinary conspiracy theories or quackery such as MMS/homeopathy/antivaxx) doesn't get too much reach.
That's simply not true: the 18th century in particular was noted for widespread pamphleteering, in which private citizens or small interest groups plastered cities with pamphlets advocating the most absurd theories — not altogether different from blogs or social media.
> measles have a happy time again "thanks" to anti-vaxxers
The anti-vaxxers were kick-started by the gatekeepers of The Lancet, which published Andrew Wakefield's study detailing a purported link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
> In India, people have been lynched "thanks" to virally spreading lies.
That's par for the course with lynching, which well pre-dates the Internet.
The problem, dear mschuster9, lies not in the Internet but in ourselves.
(I do think that there are issues with mass media in general, and how perverse incentives align to encourage discord, disharmony and chaos — because there's more money to be made in reporting 'here's what Evil Outgroup did today!' than on reporting 'nothing new, here's a picture of kittens!', but I still believe that the harms of speech are outweighed by the harms of tyranny)
Describing disinformation as a “new menace” seems like... well, disinformation. I would assume that disinformation has reared its head in just about every election in history.