Fake news? The misinformation wars

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

The most controversial legislation of this parliament is the Online Safety Bill. This vast and ever-expanding bill has for three years been subject to wrangling over new controls on harmful content and misinformation, powers that seek to make the UK ‘the safest place to be online in the world’.

A central aim is to tackle misinformation – whether in politicking and elections, war-related propaganda or global pandemics. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are already increasingly censorious in cracking down on, for example, alleged Covid ‘misinformation’ and ‘fake’ reports such as Hunter Biden’s emails or on academics questioning the official line over Russia’s war with Ukraine. Now those services are to be further encouraged to cleanse their platforms of dissenting views or questionable information. Along with an unelected regulator, Ofcom, they’ll have powers to control what we can view, hear or read.

Many worry, rightly, over the consequences for free speech. Yet as many point out, whether related to paedophiles and grooming gangs, Pizzagate or the ‘Wuhan lab leak’, claims and counter-claims around misinformation can have important consequences for how we act and who we trust. Sometimes this has dramatic consequences, as in attacks on wireless towers and telecom engineers that followed 5G conspiracy stories. More broadly, algorithms that promote misinformed content can net billions of dollars while also fuelling distrust in civil society and democracy.

How can we solve the problem of misinformation? Does the online world of anonymity, falsehoods and harms now justify new controls? Where do the boundaries lie between disinformation and genuine disagreement? At a time when even fact checkers are thought to be biased, how do we create a basis for genuine debate when the quest for truth is disfigured by an atmosphere of mistrust?

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SPEAKERS
Jessica Butcher MBE
tech entrepreneur; co-founder, Tick.; co-founder, Blippar; commissioner, Equality and Human Rights Commission

Laura Dodsworth
writer; photographer; author, A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

Professor Bill Durodié
chair of International Relations, department of politics, languages and international studies, University of Bath

Mark Johnson
legal and policy officer, Big Brother Watch

CHAIR
Bruno Waterfield
Brussels correspondent, The Times