First of all, thank you very much.
I'm very flattered and delighted to be appearing before this committee by video link. I apologize that I couldn't make it there—maybe another time.
I've had a look at who's testified before you already, and I know you've discussed general issues of democratic decline in Europe. You also have Mr. Pankowski about to speak. He's a great expert on Poland.
I'm going to talk about something more specific today, which is the media and information environment that is enabling this decline not only in Europe, but also in North America. This is something I work on very specifically at the London School of Economics.
Clearly we're living through a revolutionary moment. So many elections and so many democracies are suddenly taking surprising turns. Nationalists and xenophobes—who sound the same—are winning support in countries with very different economic and political histories—from Poland and the Philippines to Brazil and the United States.
It's my contention that just as the printing press broke the monopoly of the monks and priests who controlled the written word in the 15th century, the Internet and social media have very quickly undermined not only the business model of the democratic political media that we've known for the last two centuries, but also the political institutions behind them.
Look at the democratic world. Everywhere, large newspapers and powerful broadcasters are disappearing. These old-fashioned news organizations might have been flawed, but many of them had as their founding principle at least a commitment in theory to objectivity, to fact checking and to the general public interest. More importantly, whatever you think about them, they also created the possibility of a national conversation and a single debate.
In some big European countries, well-funded public broadcasters who are obligated by law to be politically neutral still maintain that debate, but in many smaller European countries, independent media has become very weak or has disappeared. It has been replaced by very partisan media, which is either controlled directly by one party or via business groups connected to it. That means there is no broadcaster or newspaper that both sides of the spectrum consider to be neutral.
The result is polarization. People choose sides and move apart and the centre disappears. This has other side effects. In many democracies—and I would say the United States and Poland are two of the worst—there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. This is not just about different opinions or different biases; people actually don't have the same facts. One group thinks one set of things are true and the other believes in something quite different.
Social media accelerates and accentuates this phenomenon because it allows people, and indeed its algorithms, to sometimes force people to see only the news and opinion they want to hear. These algorithms reinforce narratives that have created homogenous clusters online. These are sometimes known as echo chambers. Members of an echo chamber share the same prevailing world view, and they interpret news through this common lens.
This polarization has numerous effects, and it is extremely detrimental to democracy. It creates distrust for what used to be considered apolitical, neutral democratic institutions, such as the civil service, the police, the judiciary and government-run bodies of all kinds. They can fall under suspicion because one side or the other, or maybe both, suspects that they have been captured by the opposing party.
It also has a lethal effect on traditional political parties, which were once based on real-life organizations, like trade unions or the church. Instead of looking to those real organizations, more and more people now identify with groups or organizations that they find online, or ideas and themes that they find in the virtual world. In many places, this phenomenon has also led to fragmentation and, again, increased partisanship.
It's very important that this new information network, with its divides and its suspicious plans, is also far more conducive than the old one was to the spread of false information and false rumours, either generated naturally or imposed from outside, as well as to campaigns of insider and outsider manipulation. To put it bluntly, and this has now been proved in several studies, people who live in highly partisan echo chambers are much more likely to believe false information.
We all now know that, famously, the Russian government was the first to understand the possibilities of this new information network and that it deployed trolling operations as well as fake websites and Facebook pages to increase polarization not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K., in Germany, in France, in Italy and across eastern Europe.
For an example, I took part in a data analysis project at the London School of Economics in the months before the last Bundestag election. We found that the messages of the AfD, the German far-right populist party, were being deliberately boosted on social media by pro-Russian media, as well as by trolls and artificially created botnets.
Some of them were originally created for commercial use and then repurposed for the election. They echo and repeat divisive messages—anti-immigration, anti-NATO, anti-Merkel, pro-Russia and pro-AfD.
Most of those who read mainstream media in Germany never even saw those messages, but the AfD's alternative echo chamber read them every day, and that was one of the factors that contributed to the surprisingly large support for the AfD in that election.
Although the Russians were the first to invest in these things, others are already following them—other governments, other political movements, private companies. It's important to remember that there's no big bar to entry in this game: it doesn't cost very much, doesn't take very much time, isn't particularly high tech, and requires no special equipment. It will happen—it surely has already happened—in Canada too. As I said, these are very simple and rather cheap methods to influence public debate, and everybody is now using them.
The most important point I want to make today is that at the moment there is no institution capable of stopping this kind of manipulation. Democratic governments don't censor the Internet. They aren't in the habit of funding independent media, and if they did, they would cease to be independent.
Militaries of NATO and international institutions are not set up to fight information wars either. Even counter-intelligence services are very queasy about taking part in political debates inside their own countries. It isn't their job to penetrate echo chambers, let alone to reinvigorate democratic newspapers.
Tech companies could help to solve this problem, but at the moment they have no incentive to do so. The new information network is also where Google and Facebook are making their money. Facebook and Twitter created the algorithms that spread shock and anger and conspiracy theory faster than truth—and these are of course the elements that contribute to the rise of populism—but censorship from Google or Facebook will not in the long term be any more acceptable or successful than censorship from a government. We may see some solutions from old media or from universities. There are journalists talking about reinventing what they do in order to create greater levels of public trust. There are media literacy campaigns and fact-checking websites.
If I were going to leave you with one thought today, however, I would say that there is also another precedent to remember for this historical moment. In the 1920s and the 1930s, democratic governments also found themselves challenged by radio and by new fascist movements across Europe whose early stars were all radio stars. Adolf Hitler and Stalin actually were excellent users of the radio. They understood it as a technology that could be used to provoke anger.
People began asking whether there was a way to marshal this technology for the purposes of democracy instead. One answer to that was the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was designed from the beginning to reach all parts of the country to “inform, educate and entertain”, in the famous phrase, and to join people together not in a single set of opinions but in a single national conversation that made democracy possible.
Another set of answers was found in the United States, where journalists accepted a regulatory framework, a set of rules about libel law, and a public process that determined who could get a radio licence.
The question now, I think, for Canada and for every other liberal democracy, is how to find the equivalent of those institutions in the world of social media. In other words, what regulatory or social or legal measures will make the technology work for democracy, for our society, and not just for Facebook shareholders?
This is not an argument in favour of censorship. It's an argument in favour of applying to the online world the same kinds of regulations that have been used in other spheres to set rules on transparency, privacy, data and competition. We can regulate Internet advertising just as we regulate broadcast advertising, insisting that people know when and why they are being targeted by political ads or indeed any ads. We can curb the anonymity of the Internet. Recent research shows that the number of fake accounts on Facebook may be far higher than what the company has stated in public. We could require them to eliminate those, because we have a right to know whether we are interacting with real people or bots.
In the long term there may be some more profound solutions. Think: What would a public interest algorithm look like or a form of social media that favoured constructive conversations over polarized ones.
Regulation is not a silver bullet; it's only part of the answer. The revival of democracy, which so long was dependent on reliable information in an era of unreliable information, is going to be a major civilizational project. It may take some time before long-term solutions to this problem are found.
I will stop there to let Mr. Pankowski continue.
Thank you very much.