Written evidence submitted by the London School of Economics and Political Science
Tackling the information crisis: a summary
During 2017 and 2018, the London School of Economics and Political Science has hosted an independent Commission of Inquiry into “Truth, Trust and Technology”. This commission conducted an ongoing consultation and discussion process with an expert commission and heard from more than 100 experts, as well as many other members of the public, in order to examine the problems of mis- and disinformation and potential policy responses. The Commission’s report was published in November 2018 and argues that:
• Misinformation and disinformation should be seen as a systemic problem (an information crisis) requiring a long-term, iterative policy response
• Platforms and publishers are actively attempting to address the information crisis through self-regulation
• There is a significant evidence gap in terms of the size of the problem, and its responsiveness to self and co-regulatory solutions
• National governments, ultimately, will resolve this. There are many potential policy tools including monitoring of self and co-regulation, standard-setting, competition, fiscal and liability rules.
• The eventual settlement is as yet unclear because the effectiveness of self and co-regulation is not well understood
• Urgent action should be taken now to resolve the evidence gap through data access powers, and to establish a framework for monitoring the effectiveness of self and co-regulation.
• This should be done with careful adherence to regulatory principles such as subsidiarity and independence of regulation
• The best way to achieve this is through an institutional intervention: establishing an Independent Platform Authority with data access powers and an ‘observatory and policy advice’ remit.
The information crisis
The information crisis is systemic, and it calls for a coordinated, long-term, institutional response. There is huge uncertainty about the scale of the problem, but misinformation and disinformation appear to be growing in volume. They are adapting to new controls and their impacts are having immediate, as well as structural, consequences. Clearly, other economic, social and political changes contribute to the information crisis, but, in the UK and elsewhere, systemic change in the media system as a whole, including the new digital technology companies, is a significant contributing factor.
In setting out the problem, we have identified five “giant evils,” recalling the 1942 Beveridge Report which helped to lay the foundations for the post-war welfare state.
• Confusion: citizens are less sure about what is true, and how to believe. This is being generated by rapid media change, bringing a super abundance of sources available on a plurality of platforms that can leave individuals disoriented. An advertising model that hard-wires the continuous targeting of hyper-partisan views that play into people’s fears and prejudices results in a media system that is optimised for any kind of resonance, rather than for Truth. This harms democracy when confusion is generated by a high volume of deliberate misinformation around contentious political issues or events such as an election.
• Cynicism: citizens are losing trust, even in trustworthy sources, as shown by the results of multiple surveys. Cynicism is amplified by the deliberate exploitation of system vulnerabilities through information warfare and the spread of false information, destabilising public confidence and fomenting social antagonism.
• Fragmentation: citizens have access to potentially infinite knowledge, but the pool of agreed facts on which to base societal choices is diminishing, leaving citizens more divided into ‘truth publics’ with parallel realities and narratives. Although the causes and effects of any fragmentation is an evolving debate, media is still a significant independent factor in the quality of political discourse. Therefore, it is crucial to address how policy can respond to the challenges to democracy, especially with the shift of journalism and public interaction to encrypted channels such as WhatsApp and private channels such as Snapchat.
• Irresponsibility: power over meaning is held by organisations that lack a developed ethical code of responsibility and exist outside of clear lines of accountability and transparency. The use of the platforms is amplifying the reach of misinformation in multiple areas beyond politics. From health policy and epidemiology to military intelligence, there is alarm about the problems of misinformation, but there is no agreement on where responsibility lies.
• Apathy: as a result, citizens disengage from established structures of society and are losing faith in democracy. A well-established tactic of information warfare is to sap morale by continuous attrition through the propagation of misinformation.
Public policy should approach the information crisis as a problem of system resilience. Western liberal democracies face many long-term challenges: fragilities in our political and electoral system; changes in the economy as it passes through austerity and structural change; ecological, social and demographic changes and problems of adapting the welfare state; and the relationship of UK citizens and communities to the regional and international forces of immigration, inequality and crises in international governance. These difficult challenges have triggered simple populist responses, in part because the new media system favours the simplicity and emotionality of those responses. Negotiating these challenges will test the UK model of deliberative government to the limit.
Limitations of the responses so far
The range of stakeholder and policy responses to the information crisis is impressive: in the past three to five years a growing number of interventions has attempted to mitigate the symptoms of the information crisis. Despite these efforts, progress is likely to be slow and halting, for several reasons.
Coordination problems: Voluntary self-regulatory responses often require coordination between companies vertically along the value chain and horizontally between competing firms. Many of these companies are involved in zero-sum competition for market share and revenue, and collaboration is structurally difficult. It is difficult to imagine decisions taken with altruistic, public interest benefits as an objective, unless a wider framework of credible rules and incentives is established. There are also wider coordination problems that relate to whether standards and expectations should be industry- wide, generic rules of conduct, or whether conduct expectations should vary by platform or by jurisdiction.
Insufficient evidence: There is a broad consensus that there is an information crisis, but opinion on the depth, extent and detailed manifestation of this crisis is divided. There is a paucity of reliable data on what is happening on the platforms and a methodological challenge in analysing what data are available. The academic community currently lacks access to the data held by platforms that is essential for research that can hold them to account. Evidence, underpinned by independent research, is crucial to examine biases in the platforms’ technical and human operations.
Conflicts of interest: Stakeholders often have self-interested reasons to respond to the information crisis in different ways. News publishers seek to impose regulatory burdens on those competing with them for advertising revenue. Platforms seek to minimise regulatory burdens and secure control of more data resources. Certain political actors and interests directly benefit from the atmosphere of confusion and mistrust and seek to perpetuate it.
Protecting freedom of expression: As previous debate around the regulation of newspapers has shown, media policy-making must balance standard setting with protecting freedoms. If it were to be decided that platforms should be held to the same standards as news organisations, for example, there may be a risk of a ‘slippery slope’ towards restricting freedom of expression. The key challenge is to foster accountability while preserving the right to freedom of expression – even when the views are challenging, radical, and are offensive to some – in the face of pressure to protect the public from disinformation and the promotion of hatred or harm.
Principles for policy reform
We need a coordinated approach that aims at addressing systemic problems and creating conditions that will help to sustain democratic processes of deliberation and consensus building in the UK. Multiple competing actors need to collaborate. Any attempts to devise new structures and processes to achieve accountability and ethical practice should allow for the danger of capture by special interests and the threats they could bring to our liberty to communicate. Our report outlines the principles for policy reform which we believe must be respected for any settlement:
• Freedom of expression: The right to impart and receive ideas without interference should be preserved. Restrictions should be proportionate, legitimate and prescribed by law.
• Subsidiarity: Decisions about content standards should be taken as close as possible to those that are affected. This will often mean at a national level.
• Transparency: Decisions about filtering, promotion and takedown of content can be censorship, and can undermine trust. They should be taken according to well-known principles and reported publicly.
• Evidence: Access to improved data for regulators and the public is fundamental.
• Civil society should be involved in reforms of co-regulation and self-regulation. This may mean providing resources for organisations to be involved.
• Ongoing review: The process of reform will be an iterative process and the potential outcome (on a continuum from self-regulation, to regulation to break-up of dominant companies) is not clear at the outset.
• Independence: a new institution should be structurally independent from government, including in its appointments and finances.
Our recommendations
We call for the establishment of a new agency, independent of government but reporting to Parliament, that will primarily have an observatory and policy advice function to encourage the various initiatives attempting to address problems of information. It should be funded by a ring- fenced levy on UK social media and search advertising revenue.
The agency, which we call the Independent Platform Agency (IPA), should have the following duties:
• Report on trends in news and information sharing according to a methodological framework subject to public consultation. This could include, for example, data on the most shared and read stories, broken down by demographic group.
• Report on the effectiveness of self-regulation of the major news-carrying social and search platforms. This should include reports on trust marks, credibility signalling, filtering and takedown.
• Mobilise and coordinate all relevant actors to ensure an inclusive and sustained programme in media literacy for both children and adults, and conduct evaluations of initiatives. It should work with Ofcom to ensure sufficient evidence on the public’s critical news and information literacy.
• Report annually to Parliament on the performance of platforms’ self-regulation efforts and any long- term needs for regulatory action.
• Provide reports on request to other agencies such as the Electoral Commission, Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office, to support the performance of their duties, according to agreed criteria.
• The IPA should work closely with Ofcom and with the Competition and Markets Authority to monitor the level of market dominance and the impact of platforms on media plurality and quality.
The IPA will need powers to request data from all the major platforms (determined by a UK advertising revenue threshold) on the top most shared news and information stories, referrals, news-sharing trends and case studies of particular stories. The types of data should be determined on the basis of public consultation on monitoring methodologies and according to a shared template that applies across different companies above the threshold. These data will be held by the IPA within a tight confidentiality regime to protect privacy and commercial sensitivities. It will also need powers to impose fines on platforms if they fail to provide data, and to request additional data when a court order is granted.
Government should mobilise and coordinate a new integrated media literacy programme
Media literacy messages need to be based on a reliable set of principles that are understood by news providers, educators and platforms, and they need to be implemented effectively and consistently over time in an unstable world.
Media literacy should be the fourth pillar of education alongside reading, writing and maths. The Department for Education should lead an inclusive educational framework to build digital literacy and the IPA would coordinate work with the BBC and public service broadcasters, libraries, the National Literacy Trust and the platforms.
There needs to be a focus on both children in schools – for example, a compulsory media literacy module in citizenship classes – but also on adults in further and vocational education. A new integrated programme in media literacy needs to reach out to groups not in education or training and especially hard-to-reach groups. Both platforms and civil society organisations need to be incorporated into a programme that could include the provision and use of media literacy toolkits to integrate media literacy into wider social activism and services.
We also note that it is often hoped, particularly by those who are wary of the complications of regulation, that we could solve all the problems of the information crisis by educating the public to understand the digital environment, and to discern between real and ‘fake’ information. But education is no silver bullet solution, and nor should it be called on merely because other solutions are seen as too difficult, as the policy of ‘last resort.’
Without intervening in the information environment through policy and regulation, we risk tasking the individual with dealing with the complexities and problems of today’s information crisis. Since the individual can hardly succeed where governments cannot, relying on media literacy alone risks not only burdening but also blaming the individual for the problems of the digital environment.
Legislative change is needed to regulate political advertising
Electoral regulation in the UK is diffuse and unfit for purpose. Regulation is spread across a number of institutions resulting in regulatory blind spots. The Government should act urgently to introduce legislation supporting a mandatory code for political advertising before the next election. The Electoral Commission needs the powers to act quickly in response to emerging risks including requiring spending information and accountability on online advertisements during elections and referendums by foreign organisations and individuals. Legislation is needed to ensure greater transparency of the sources of information produced and circulated on the platforms during an election. Legislation should include provisions, subject to assessment of impact, for levying heavier fines on organisations or individuals who break the law. In addition, the Government should introduce legislation to enable the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Electoral Commission to create a new standards code for political advertising online.
Conclusion
It is for Parliament, with cross-party support, to empower an independent institution with the tools it needs to support existing actions of the media, platforms and civil society. The alternative to setting up a transparent institution that is independent of government and established by law will be to continue with muddling through and opaque fudging, and with the delegation of censorship to private bodies, further compounding the crisis of truth and trust.
The time for decisive action to end the information crisis is now.