"House of Commons select committees often do useful work. Yet very few of them produce reports with the potential to reshape the political landscape. The weekend report by the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee on disinformation and “fake news” is one of these exceptions. What started in 2017 as a herbivorous munch through some of the issues surrounding fake news, the future of journalism and digital advertising has evolved into part of the tooth-and-claw battle for power with the digital tech companies and partisan campaigners over the future of democracy. The result is a report that deserves to be described as essential reading because it deals with issues demanding essential action. For this is subject-matter on which neutrality is not an option. The government’s reaction to it will be a defining statement of its own moral seriousness and worthiness to govern.
"The issues raised in the report are existential for parliamentary democracy and for rational public policy-making. As the report confesses, the all-party committee has learned a truth about which too much of the political and media class, as well as the public itself, remains in denial. “What became clear,” the report says, “is that, without the knowledge of most politicians and election regulators across the world, not to mention the wider public, a small group of individuals and businesses had been influencing elections across different jurisdictions in recent years.” As that implies, this is an internationally aware report about an international problem that ultimately will require an international solution.
"Even so, there will only be any kind of international solution if national parliaments and governments grasp what is at stake first. What is at stake is the threat from unregulated social media monopolies and from bold and well-funded activist conspiracies. The report has many new and disturbing things to say about Russian dirty tricks and destabilisation, Facebook’s consistent refusals to acknowledge its practical, moral or legal responsibilities, and the reckless audacity and contempt with which groups like SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica, Global Science Research and Aggregate IQ – as well as the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns – defied the regulatory authorities and the whole idea of the rule of law in politics. It is not impossible that this superior ruthlessness, audacity and defiance enabled the leave side to win the 2016 referendum with its anti-immigration messages. If that isn’t shocking, then the word has no meaning.
"Yet what is ultimately at stake here concerns the future even more than the past. The report is a wake-up call about the failures of traditional governance. The need for rules and enforcement cannot be tackled by what the committee calls “blunt, reactive and outmoded legislative instruments”. But it can be tackled by absolute clarity about the threat and its impact in every future electoral contest. This will require not just modernised regulation but education – which the committee boldly says should be funded by a levy on the social media companies – about digitally literacy and truthfulness. Only government can ensure this.
"In his statement accompanying the launch of the report, the committee chair, Damian Collins, a populist Tory centrist, sets the bar high. “We are facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy,” he says, “based on the systematic manipulation of data to support the relentless targeting of citizens, without their consent, by campaigns of disinformation and messages of hate.”
"These are extraordinary words – yet every part of his statement should be taken seriously. The democratic crisis is all around us in the era of Trump and Brexit. The systematic unaccountable manipulation of data is a sleepless reality of the digital era about which the public and public bodies remain naive. The lack of consent goes to the heart of an unequal relationship in which public control is lacking over a too-often lawless and amoral space in people’s lives. And the campaigns of disinformation and messages of hate – unchecked and uncontrolled – threaten the rational basis of discourse and policy-making without which mutual trust cannot function."
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