Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the distinguished members of the international grand committee for the kind invitation to speak before you today. It's really an honour to support international co-operation in this form.
In my work, I wear two hats. I'm a historian and I analyze policy. I know wearing two hats is a bit of a strange fashion choice, but I think it can help to lead us to much more robust solutions that can stand the test of time.
In my policy work, I have written about hate speech and disinformation in Canada, the United States and in Europe. I'm a member of the steering committee of the transatlantic high level working group on content moderation online and freedom of expression.
Wearing my history hat, I've been working for nearly a decade on the history of media. I just finished this book, which is called News From Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945. Among other things in this book, I detail how it is that Germany's vibrant, interwar media democracy descended into an authoritarian Nazi regime that could spread anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic propaganda around the world.
While I was writing this book, the present caught up with history in all sorts of, frankly, disturbing ways. The far right around the world revived Nazi terminology using lügenpresse and systempresse—the lying press and the system press—to decry the media. Marginalized groups were targeted online and they were blamed for societal ills that they did not cause. News was falsified for political and economic purposes. Like with radio in the first half of the 20th century, a technology designed with utopian aims became a tool for dictators and demagogues.
As our other witnesses have described, some aspects of the Internet are unprecedented, such as the micro-targeting, the scale, the machine learning and the granular level of surveillance, but some of the underlying patterns look surprisingly familiar to the historians among us.
I'm going to offer five brief lessons from this history that I think can guide our policy discussions in the future and enable us to build robust solutions that can make our democracies stronger rather than weaker.
The first lesson is that disinformation is also an international relations problem. Information warfare has been a feature, not a bug, of the international system for at least a century. The question is not if information warfare exists, but why and when states engage in it.
What we see is that it's often when a state feels encircled, weak or aspires to become a greater power than it already is. This is as true for Germany a hundred years ago as it is for Russia today. If many of the causes of disinformation are geopolitical, we need to remember that many of the solutions will be geopolitical and diplomatic as well.
Second, we need to pay attention to the physical infrastructure of what is happening. Information warfare and disinformation are also enabled by physical infrastructure, whether it's the submarine cables a century ago or fibre optic cables today. One of Britain's first acts of war in World War I was to cut the cables that connected Germany to the rest of the world, pushing Germany to invest in a new communications technology, which was radio. By the time the Nazis came to power, one American radio executive would call it the most potent political agency the world had ever known.
We often think of the Internet as wireless, but that's fundamentally untrue; 95% to 99% of international data flows through undersea fibre optic cables. Google partly owns 8.5% of those submarine cables. Content providers also own physical infrastructure. Sometimes those cables get disrupted because they get bitten through by sharks, but states can bite, too. We do know that Russia and China, for example, are surveying European and North American cables.
We know China, of course, is investing in 5G, but it is combining that in ways that Germany did as well, with investments in international news networks like the Belt and Road News Network, English language TV channels like CGTN, or the Chinese news agency, Xinhua.
The third lesson, as many of the other witnesses have said, is that we need to think about business models much more than individual pieces of content. It's very tempting to focus on examples of individual content that are particularly harmful, but the reason that those pieces of content go viral is because of the few companies that control the bottleneck of information.
Only 29% of Americans or Brits understand that their Facebook newsfeed is algorithmically organized. The most aware are the Finns and only 39% of them understand that. That invisibility accords social media platforms an enormous amount of power. That power is not neutral. At a very minimum, we need far more transparency about how algorithms work, whether they are discriminatory and so on and so forth. As we strive towards evidence-based policy, we need good evidence.
Fourth, we need to be careful to design robust regulatory institutions. Here, the case of Germany in the interwar period offers a cautionary tale. Spoken radio emerged in the 1920s. Bureaucrats in the democratic Weimar Republic wanted to ensure that radio would bolster democracy in a very new democracy after World War I. As that democracy became more politically unstable, those bureaucrats continually instituted reforms that created more and more state supervision of content. The idea here was to protect democracy by preventing news from spreading that would provoke violence. The deep irony of this story is that the minute the Nazis came to power, they controlled radio. Well-intentioned regulation, if we're not careful, can have tragic unintended consequences.
What does that mean for today? It means we have to democracy-proof whatever the solutions are that we come up with. We need to make sure that we embed civil society in whatever institutions we create.
One suggestion that I made with Fenwick McKelvey and Chris Tenove was the idea of social media councils that would be multi-stakeholder fora and that could meet regularly to actually deal with many of the problems we're describing. The exact format and geographical scope are still up for debate, but it's an idea supported by many, including the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion.
Fifth, we need to make sure that we still pay attention to and address the societal divisions exploited by social media. The seeds of authoritarianism need fertile soil to grow. If we do not attend to the underlying economic and social discontent, better communication cannot obscure those problems forever.
Let me then remind you of these five lessons. First, disinformation is also an international relations problem. Second, we need to pay attention to physical infrastructure. Third, business models matter more than do individual pieces of content. Fourth, we need to build robust regulatory institutions. Fifth, we must pay attention to those societal divisions that are exploited on social media.
Attending to all of these things, there is no way they can be done within any one nation; they must be done also through international co-operation. That's why it's such a great honour to have had the chance to appear before you today.
Thank you very much.