A Harvard University expert on misinformation and disinformation says the Government shouldn't shy away from regulating big tech companies which act with impunity
Harmful misinformation and disinformation on the internet is a global problem, a visiting American expert says, but that doesn't mean it has to play out in New Zealand the way it has in the United States.
Joan Donovan is the head of the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard University, the co-author of a book on the digital underworld that led to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol, and one of the inventors of the beaver emoji. That last achievement didn't get as much airtime in an interview with Newsroom last week, on the tail end of her two-week tour of New Zealand, sponsored by the US Embassy, Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons and Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures.
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Instead, Donovan shared her views on how well New Zealand was coping with disinformation – domestic and imported – and how we could avoid following the path that led to the attempted insurrection in Washington DC.
"My expectations have been met – and more so, I think," she said. "I've felt a deep respect for freedom of expression here. Beyond just freedom of speech, which is something that we focus on quite a bit in the United States without thinking thoroughly about the other aspects of freedom of expression like the right to seek and receive information, the right to truth."
The policymakers and regulators who Donovan met have a deep understanding of the scale and seriousness of the issue, she added. That may not be representative of the entire government, however.
"The people I've met with self-selected into wanting to listen to someone who studies this rattle on about how, like Chicken Little, the sky is falling. I do think that many people care deeply about it," she said.
Without that respect for the truth, without respect for democracies, without respect for the deeply held values of your society, you're going to end up in a very similar position that we have in the US
"I do know that Dame [Jacinda] Ardern has been working very hard with the Christchurch Call to keep it going. I do feel that we do need to re-centre the narrative – less about what the tech platforms are and what they imagine themselves to be and more on impacted families and holding the companies to account for what has been done with their technology and what continues to be done to harass and spread hate amongst affected communities."
This was a repeated theme during the interview – governments, including New Zealand's, needed to take a tougher line with platforms. Can New Zealand really tackle these multinational giants on its own, though?
"The New Zealand Government really has a very deep commitment and grasp of the problem of disinformation. But there's an attitude towards negotiation with these companies. These companies are acting as techno-states – they're negotiating in ways that we wouldn't allow other corporations to negotiate," she said.
That may prompt a backlash from the corporations, as in Canada where Facebook is blocking all news links after the government passed legislation to require it (and other big tech companies) to pay for news on its platform.
"That just means that we're going to have to invest in other avenues for people to get news and information," Donovan said. "So I think that governments worldwide shouldn't be afraid of threats of these companies backing away – expressly because the businesses aren't generating massive revenue for others.
"In many ways, they are extractive industries. If the company isn't going to abide by the laws, they aren't going to share the revenue with other industries that have been impacted, then the government's role is to make them comply."
This also gets to Donovan's view of how New Zealand can bolster its resilience to misinformation. Countries need to have a robust media with public interest objectives to counter bad actors who will otherwise fill the vacuum with their own harmful content. The same goes for other traditional authoritative sources, such as civil society and academia.
Instead, the commercial operating model for journalism is broken, so it leads either to cuts to genuine reporting or a turn towards the content that does turn a profit: outrage, clickbait, vapidity. Civil society isn't much better off.
"What's challenging is there are major rollbacks in the universities here, major rollbacks related to journalism, and so we're in a new era here where social media is the distribution for news and information but they haven't taken up the mantle as guardians of truth, like journalists, like teachers, like librarians, like our civil society has done," she said.
"Without that respect for the truth, without respect for democracies, without respect for the deeply held values of your society, you're going to end up in a very similar position that we have in the US. Where you have a very authoritarian government that wants to maintain the status quo because that's how they got there."
We have a bit of shielding because our mainstream politicians are not engaging in the sort of disinformation operations happening in the US. But that tool is still there, and the main thing holding them back is convention and perception.
"If it is the case that you have incendiary politicians running for office that are using the internet to spread vitriolic content about small groups of people that don't have a lot of representation or if they're spreading disinformation about their political opponents, then yeah you're going to head in this direction," Donovan said.
"As well, if you develop more of a partisan media ecosystem that's very profitable, that traffics in novelty and outrage. These are the key components."
Even so, there will still be a steady drumbeat of outside pressure, aimed at eroding our democracy. We saw that many of the narratives during the Parliament occupation were imported directly from the US and Canada. The anti-public health movement that arose in the years before that protest was similarly built on disinformation from overseas.
That had brought us back to regulation, Donovan said. Public interest journalism and a strengthened academia acting as the critic and conscience of society are important backstops, but to cut off the flow of harmful content requires action from tech companies.
This should be no different to the many other sectors we regulate, that bring with them benefits and drawbacks, Donovan argued. Think of tobacco, firearms, aviation, pharmaceuticals.
"There are ways in which government can think about these technology companies simply like we think about products and not become so enchanted by the design and the ambition of technology, and rather focus on: what are the contemporary benefits and harms, and how do we regulate that?"
There are enchanting things about the internet, but it will be hard to appreciate them if they're accompanied by a slew of lies and hate whenever we log on. Dealing with that harmful content is a prerequisite if we want to get back to the simple joy of the beaver emoji.
