Welcome back to a new issue of Recoding Tech’s newsletter. Together with the website, each recoding.tech newsletter offers relevant analyses and highlights of the policy discussions, research, and news from the past month that are shaping the rules for Big Tech.
In this month’s issue:
Featured topic
Supporting Local News and Journalism in the Era of Big Tech
What else
Updates on how governments are recoding tech
Highlights from new research, policy papers, and news/commentary
Featured topic
Supporting Local News and Journalism in the Era of Big Tech
In a keynote address at a symposium last month, former U.S. President Barack Obama noted, “one of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information.” More specifically, he argued that a “new [social-media-driven] information ecosystem is turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses,” reinforcing “our blind spots, our prejudices,” and deepening “existing racial and religious and cultural divides.”
As the former president’s remarks underscore, the question is no longer whether an information crisis exists but rather what democratic governments should do to address it. Obama offered a handful of solutions in his speech, such as modest reforms to Section 230 (the U.S. law that immunizes platforms like Facebook from liability for what users post) and greater platform transparency with data sharing for researchers. Beyond regulation, he called for efforts to bolster the public’s resiliency to disinformation through teaching media literacy in schools to help children better “evaluate sources and separate opinion from fact.” He also pointed to the need to find “creative ways to reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism.”
The debate over platform liability often receives the most attention in policy discussions on how governments should address today’s information disorder. Yet Obama’s final recommendation is also a vital piece of the puzzle, albeit one that often gets overlooked – even though support for quality journalism and news is one of the few solutions that consistently holds widespread agreement among disparate leaders and advocates. As trusted intermediaries, newspapers and other journalistic outlets play an essential role in democracy by helping to build a shared set of facts and knowledge while also fostering government accountability.
Unfortunately, as Obama noted, trust in the news – the very sources where citizens can go to obtain a common understanding of the world – is diminishing as the U.S. “media has become nationalized and hence, more ideological.” The good news is that the American public still trusts local news. Local news outlets can be less concerned with pushing stories that reflect divisive national debates, and instead are able to focus on the kinds of factual reporting that help the public understand the world around them. The bad news is that local news – and particularly the local daily newspaper – is rapidly disappearing, another casualty of the rapid rise of Big Tech.
Though governments worldwide are beginning to work to prop up the news industry writ large, many of these proposed policy efforts will likely do very little to help local news and journalism. Instead, they may only prove to bolster the nationalized media that has the scale necessary to sustain itself in today’s information ecosystem. Policies that pit Big Tech vs. Big Media will leave out the kinds of local news institutions that are more likely to break through the partisan divide currently plaguing the public discourse. So, if governments are genuinely interested in preserving local coverage and reporting, what should they do differently?
Read more on recoding.tech.
Updates on how governments are recoding tech
Recoding.tech is tracking existing and proposed laws and regulations, along with government investigations and litigation from across the U.S. and Europe. Here are the new additions and updates for April. You can view all the actions tracked on recoding.tech using our law & regulation tracker.
European Union. For April, the big news in the E.U. was an agreement on the Digital Services Act by the European Parliament and the European Commission. The final text is not publicly available, though enough details emerged to provide a broad outline of the issues it will cover. In March, Parliament and the Commission also reached a political agreement on the Digital Markets Act. Both acts need to be adopted by the EU co-legislators, after which they will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union.
United States. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act may be getting closer to a full vote in the U.S. Senate. The bill prohibits discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms, including a ban on self-preferencing a platform operator’s products, services, or lines of business over those of another business. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March and placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar. One of the bill’s co-sponsors in the House of Representatives expects the bill to pass both chambers before Congress’s August recess.
Did we miss something for March? Email hello@recoding.tech with recommendations.
Highlights from research, policy papers, and news/commentary
Recoding Tech curates a collection of academic and civil society research, policy papers, investigative journalism, and op-eds. These articles illuminate what’s wrong with Big Tech’s platforms and business models, debate policy options that could address the problems, and make recommendations for government action. Below are some highlights from April, organized by topic. You can explore the entire collection in our library.
How social media is weakening democracy. Obama’s Stanford speech underscored how the current information ecosystem is weakening democracy, in no small part by the ability to game social media’s algorithms or artificially boost the reach of deceptive messages. New research on bots and support for QAnon on Twitter during the first impeachment of former President Trump found that bots represented 10% of Qanon supporters (compared to 1% of all other users) and generated over 31% of all impeachment related tweets. Another analysis from Brazil examines the use of mobile platforms like WhatsApp as a stage for astroturfing and disinformation in the country’s 2018 elections. In the Journal of Democracy, Ronald Deibert describes the growing threat of subversive disinformation and hacking campaigns to democracy, the rule of law, and public accountability. Also, Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic looks at the negative impact of social media on nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the United State’s future. Finally, commentary from Karen Korbluh in Tech Policy Press asserts social media's responsibility to take action to defend democracy.
Bots, Disinformation, and the First Trump Impeachment — ArXiv
WhatsApp and Digital Astroturfing: A Social Network Analysis of Brazilian Political Discussion Groups of Bolsonaro’s Supporters — International Journal of Communication
Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage — Journal of Democracy
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid — The Atlantic
Obama’s Right, Elon’s Wrong: Democracy Needs to Defend Itself Against Disinformation — Tech Policy Press
Disinformation and COVID-19. COVID-19 continues to shape understanding of how disinformation spreads, its impact on public health, and interventions that could mitigate its harmful effects. A report from the News and Media Research Centre examines how and where Australians are getting information about COVID-19, which sources they find trustworthy, and their experiences with misinformation. Using a survey of Twitter users, a study examined how social endorsement systems on Twitter affected assessments of the credibility of (fake) news during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found evidence that Twitter users consider fake news with a greater number of likes, comments, and retweets as more credible than news retweeted by a celebrity and without those social cues. Another analysis of COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets found a negative relationship between misinformation and vaccination uptake rates.
A study of COVID-19 disinformation involving students in Vietnam showed that vaccine-acceptance comments in news stories significantly increased vaccine intentions than vaccine-hesitancy comments, but only if the commenters were seen as being in the same political/cultural group as the student. Two other studies looked at the effect of inoculation on reducing belief in misinformation. The first found evidence that a series of short, 30-second inoculation videos boosted the ability of unvaccinated participants to identify rhetorical strategies used in misinformation, resulting in them sharing less false information and being more willing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. A related study, but not specific to COVID-19, evaluated the effect of inoculation strategies and found that corrections’ (e.g., fact-checking) of misinformation from highly credible sources failed to decrease belief in misinformation by participants who were not inoculated. However, inoculated participants relied on misinformation less when the correction came from a highly credible source.
COVID-19: Australian News and Misinformation Longitudinal Study — News and Media Research Centre
Twitter and Endorsed (Fake) News: The Influence of Endorsement by Strong Ties, Celebrities, and a User Majority on Credibility of Fake News During the COVID-19 Pandemic — International Journal of Communication
Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal — Scientific Reports
When Vaccine Uncertainty Prevails: Association Between Online Social Influence and COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions — International Journal of Communication
A Quasi-Experimental Intervention Trial: Testing the Efficacy of Attitudinal Inoculation Videos to Enhance COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance — JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Vaccination against misinformation: The inoculation technique reduces the continued influence effect – PLOS ONE
Social media is failing to counter digital hate and harassment. Two new reports from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate illuminate how social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, failed to take sufficient steps to address hate speech and harassment, even when the content violated the platform's community standards and policies. In the first report, the Centre found that over 88% of posts containing anti-Muslim hatred that it reported were not acted upon (either removing the post or offending account) by the platforms. In another example, the platforms failed to act on 89% of posts promoting the “Great Replacement” conspiracy. A second report found that Instagram failed to act on 90% of abuse sent via direct messages (DM) to the women in its study.
Anti-Muslim Hate: Failure to protect — Centre for Countering Digital Hate
Hidden Hate: How Instagram fails to act on 9 in 10 reports of misogyny in DMs — Centre for Countering Digital Hate
Is E.U. privacy law on the right track? The General Data Protection (GDPR) was expected to be the toughest privacy and security law in the world, but enforcement issues have significantly hampered its effectiveness. Vice broke a story in April that Facebook may not comply with a key requirement of the GDPR. Article 5 of the law mandates that personal data must be “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes.” However, according to a document leaked to Vice, “Facebook’s own engineers admit that they are struggling to make sense and keep track of where user data goes once it’s inside Facebook’s systems.” One section of the document compares the company’s data collection systems to a bottle of ink poured into a lake, where the ink “flows everywhere.” In another critique of the GDPR, two European researchers conclude that the “fundamental right to personal data protection in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the paradigm of the data subject rights in the GDPR are at odds with the practical reality of ubiquitous trade in personal data.” They suggest it may be time for the EU to start making some choices on whether the goal is to protect people and their personal data or to build a data economy on the basis of personal data.
Facebook Doesn’t Know What It Does With Your Data, Or Where It Goes: Leaked Document — Vice
Priceless data: why the EU fundamental right to data protection is at odds with trade in personal data — Computer Law & Security Review
The difficulty of moderating a ‘gladiatorial arena.’ The potential acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk placed a spotlight on Twitter’s content moderation practices. In The Atlantic, Renée DiResta challenged Musk’s view of Twitter as a ‘public square’ and his rejection of content moderation. Another Atlantic article examines how social media’s lack of transparency in its content algorithms and moderation feeds the public's growing sense of distrust and undermines efforts to reign in disinformation. Finally, a collaborative study by academic researchers tackles the persistent accusation that Twitter and other platforms are biased against conservatives. It found that although Twitter suspended more Republican users, users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. The “observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats” could be “explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation.”
Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech — The Atlantic
Shadowbanning Is Big Tech’s Big Problem — The Atlantic
Did we miss something for March? Email hello@recoding.tech with recommendations.
About us
Recoding Tech is a Reset-supported initiative. Reset is engaged in programmatic work on technology and democracy. It seeks to change the way the internet enables the spread of news and information so that it serves the public good over corporate and political interests — ensuring tech companies once again work for democracy rather than against it.