Juno News - October 30, 2019


Government made up the “misinformation” crisis


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

157.96954

Word Count

778

Sentence Count

33


Summary

The Liberal government's war on misinformation is a solution in search of a problem. It's a battle the Liberals have been waging for the last couple of years, saying that the information you get on social media, online, simply cannot be trusted, and it's government that has to lead the way in making the internet more trustworthy.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The Liberal government's war on misinformation is a solution in search of a problem.
00:00:16.500 It's a battle the Liberals have been waging for the last couple of years,
00:00:20.100 saying that the information that you get on social media, online, simply cannot be trusted,
00:00:25.500 and it's government that has to lead the way in making the internet more trustworthy, combating misinformation.
00:00:33.000 Now, by the way, I happen to agree with the premise that you can't believe everything you encounter on the internet,
00:00:38.000 but I fail to see how governments and politicians, arguably the biggest purveyors of misinformation,
00:00:44.000 are the ones that can bring a solution, or in fact, the ones that can bring anything other than an emboldening of the very problem.
00:00:52.000 But with the election behind us, the government is now doubling down on what has been its long-standing desire to regulate social media.
00:00:59.500 This was a policy proposal that was put forward within the Liberal caucus.
00:01:04.000 It's also something we've seen under the auspices of combating hate speech.
00:01:08.000 And now that the election is done, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould says more needs to be done
00:01:15.500 about the battle against misinformation and disinformation.
00:01:20.000 This was covered in a CBC story, which seemed to actually discredit the very point that Gould was trying to put forward.
00:01:29.000 Take a look at a couple of the sections of this here.
00:01:32.000 A task force called the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol Panel, composed largely of high-level bureaucrats,
00:01:40.000 was charged with alerting the public.
00:01:42.500 Despite detecting some misinformation, it was never at that critical level where there needed to be any sort of public notification or public alert.
00:01:51.500 Now, the cynic in me suggests that if the election looked like it were headed a different direction
00:01:56.500 and the Liberals weren't going to win, perhaps things would have reached that critical level.
00:02:01.500 But again, that's just a part of me that generally tends to assume the worst of governments.
00:02:07.000 But you look at some of the experts that are quoted in this story
00:02:10.500 and they say that there really wasn't this mass misinformation fear that was supposed to have happened.
00:02:18.500 That we had media outlets coming up with misinformation bureaus like the National Observer, like CBC,
00:02:24.500 or government itself coming up with this task force.
00:02:27.500 There really wasn't this problem.
00:02:29.500 One of the examples of this is an organization called AstroScreen,
00:02:34.500 which did a report and found that of the 273,000 Canadian politics and election 43 hashtag mentions,
00:02:42.500 4,433 were made by less than 1,700 low-credibility Twitter accounts,
00:02:49.500 which is to say Twitter accounts they suspect of being bots.
00:02:53.500 But AstroScreen also concedes that this is pretty much negligible.
00:02:58.500 Quote, we didn't see a major network of inauthentic accounts trying to interfere with the outcome of the election.
00:03:05.500 Later in the story, Kevin Chan of Facebook basically says the same thing,
00:03:09.500 that Facebook was not used by its own measures and its own audits as a tool of spreading misinformation,
00:03:15.500 a tool of spreading inauthentic accounts.
00:03:19.500 So why are we then seeing a government that insists more needs to be done?
00:03:24.500 Why is government using what is essentially in the common parlance a nothing burger to justify cracking down on this problem that doesn't exist?
00:03:33.500 The reason is very simple.
00:03:35.500 It gives the government justification to regulate social media like it's been talking about doing for quite some time.
00:03:42.500 Regulating social media companies, forcing them to comply with what the government standards of speech are.
00:03:48.500 We saw CTV run a story just about a week and a half ago reporting on an audit that was done by Hill & Knowlton,
00:03:55.500 a strategic development and management firm.
00:03:58.500 And this found that Wexit, Western Sentiments, Western Separation were really being driven by bot accounts.
00:04:07.500 One of those accounts, by the way, responded to the story and said,
00:04:10.500 I'm not a bot, I'm a residential school survivor.
00:04:13.500 But you're trying to erase my identity by just saying, oh, it's just a bot account.
00:04:17.500 But this is something we see routinely on social media, where if you don't like it, oh, it's just a bot, it's just misinformation,
00:04:24.500 it's just trolls.
00:04:25.500 That may be so, but you cannot claim that voices that are real, that disagree with you, are, because they disagree with you, no longer real.
00:04:34.500 It just doesn't work that way.
00:04:36.500 But we have to be on guard for government ramming through some effort to, in fact, curb online speech expression, online free speech,
00:04:45.500 because they claim to be doing it to sanctify the public space that is the internet.
00:04:51.500 I don't buy it, and neither should you.
00:04:53.500 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.