There was a reassuring sense of common purpose in a joint media release this week by the four bodies charged with keeping the next election’s media campaigns honest. So why did I get a feeling it was like a rerun of the League of Nations in the 1930s?
The media release announced a short video described as a consumer guide to complaints processes during the election. The video explained the roles of the Electoral Commission (NZEC), Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), and New Zealand Media Council (NZMC) in the complaints process. The four bodies also helpfully provided an infographic on who does what.
Each organisation has specific jurisdiction during elections and rules that must be followed. The Electoral Commission has comprehensive rules for political parties, candidates, and third party promoters on everything from hoardings and flyers to how much can be spent on advertising. Both the Advertising Standards Authority and Broadcasting Standards Authority have comprehensive rules, guides, and a stack of past rulings that light their path. The Media Council simply requires election editorial coverage to comply with its 12 principles of good journalism.
The release carried a solemn statement from the four bodies:
“Political speech and election related content, which includes campaign material and commentary on advocacy groups, politicians, political parties and their policies, are vital components of the right to freedom of expression and a democratic election process. We are committed to supporting all those who publish or promote election related content to comply with the standards expected within New Zealand, and encourage members of the public who view, read or hear content that concerns them to raise this with us.”
Now, all this is very reassuring and New Zealand does have a good working model for ensuring election advertising and media coverage is above board. Electors have been reasonably well served in past elections and over time a system has developed that allows for fast redress on matters requiring urgent attention.
The League of Nations also had its successes – it managed to ban the use of gas in war – but it was spectacularly ineffective in preventing the Second World War.
That was because all of the axis states – Germany, Italy, and Japan – had left the organisation and, in spite of the league being the brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson, the United States had never joined.
And there, I fear, is the parallel.
The issues facing New Zealand during the upcoming general election will not stem from those who have (one way or another) joined up to the regulatory processes, but from those who are outside their control.
The ASA concerns itself with advertisers (including influencers), while the BSA is restricted to broadcasters, the NZEC to election entities defined by law, and the NZMC to a list of self-nominating print and online/digital members.
Nowhere in the list of those covered by these regulatory bodies will you find the transnational digital search and social media platforms that will be the superhighways for the information that poses the greatest threat to legitimate democratic engagement.
Those who place paid advertising on such platforms or use them to carry their influencer vlogs and blogs could fall within the jurisdiction of the ASA. Media Council members who place content on them will also be accountable. Beyond that is no-man’s-land.
The Internet provides an almost infinite array of means by which individuals and organisations can spread material and, increasingly, that traffic is visible only to believers and fellow travellers…until it gains sufficient momentum to burst forth amid an unsuspecting public.
The environment is tailormade for misinformation and – far more concerning – disinformation. The terms are often used interchangeably but I believe we should make a clear distinction: Misinformation is where information may be incorrect through simple error, but the disinformation is a deliberate act to spread untruth with the aim of skewing people’s thinking and attitudes.
Either way, information that is wrong and sometimes dangerous is spreading. Daniel Levitin, the author of Weaponized Lies, describes it as “promiscuous”.
“It consorts with people of all social and educational classes and turns up in places you don’t expect it to. It propagates as one person passes it on to another and another, as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media spread it around the world; the m(d)isinformation can take hold and become well known, and suddenly a whole lot of people are believing things that aren’t so.”
Want a perfect example: The falsehood that New Zealand media had been ‘bought off’ by the Labour Government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund. It is nonsense, but how many have heard it repeated by intelligent people? Worse, how many of you believe it is true?
I can argue long into the night in an attempt to debunk that conspiracy theory but I will inevitably fail, because facts will not prevail over what people want to be ‘true’. And that is no truer than when it comes to politics.
A study by psychologists from three United States universities released in May showed that fact-checking and correction can backfire when it comes from outside groups. Often, when dealing with political partisanship, those outgroups are the news media. Political partisanship was found to be five times stronger than correction. The researchers concluded it suggests that partisan identity may drive irrational belief updating.
You might try to dismiss the findings by saying: ‘Yes, but that’s the United States’. There may have been a time when I might have agreed, but the occupation of Parliament’s grounds last year disabused me of any thoughts that ‘it couldn’t happen here’.
Irrational partisan thinking can – and will – manifest itself during the 2023 general election. And it will be communicated through channels that are largely beyond the control of civil society.
It will not be split down traditional party lines or even Left versus Right. It will be deeply nuanced and driven by multiple layers of interacting factors. To use an unscientific term: it will be messy.
Irrespective of its provenance, it has the potential to disrupt saner civil discourse.
If we lack the regulatory means to keep this flow of misinformation and disinformation from affecting the democratic process, what can we do?
The US study should not dissuade news media from fact-checking and correcting. Those processes may not forestall a conspiracy’s journey, but it will at least ensure that the record is set straight for those who have not joined the ranks of unquestioning ‘believers’.
However, news media should ensure that they do not become unwitting spreaders of lies. There may be a temptation to correct any enticing conspiracy theory found on social media without first determining that it has any sort of wider currency. That simply serves the perpetrator’s ends.
When disinformation needs to be challenged, strenuous efforts should be made by journalists to find the original source. That information may speak volumes about the intentions of the perpetrator. An example: Investigating the source of many thousands of anti-EU tweets in the 48 hours before Britain’s Brexit vote revealed they emanated from a state-run bureau in Russia.
When disinformation is debunked, the truth should be presented in such a way that the facts have supremacy over the lies. Too often, the conspiracy theory gains the headline with ‘not’ as an afterthought.
And, if the regulators are unable to hold the platforms to account, the news media certainly can. If platforms allow disinformation to propagate, news media must question why and, when they are inevitably met with blank stares or crude emojis, name and shame the carriers of lies.
That, of course, will only catch the open platforms and they are no longer the conduits of choice when disinformation is germinating. Services that offer end-to-end encryption are where much of the poison is mixed and is difficult (but not impossible) for journalists to penetrate. Governments, too, have been looking for ways to enforce access, most often on national security grounds. However, accessing encrypted messages carries a raft of legal issues, many of which were identified in a report by the New Zealand Law Foundation.
Encrypted services are growing in popularity, particularly with younger users. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report shows that this year, 14 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds opt for Telegram, the messaging app popular with white supremacists. Such platforms are the ‘proving ground’ for conspiracy theories and disinformation that then migrates to open platforms such as Facebook and YouTube before sometimes finding their way to mainstream media.
New Zealand news media profess to be mindful of the presence of disinformation and coded ‘flag waving’ by extremists. It is a far from static environment, one which will change with increasing speed thanks to artificial intelligence. Newsrooms need to be vigilant. They would also benefit from industry-wide information sharing, a concept that has yet to find favour with some media executives.
While one hopes that our political candidates would not stoop to using the malevolent tools of disinformation, they are capable of creating their own versions of truth and of simply getting it wrong. Here, too, the media have a responsibility to set the record straight, but they must be careful not to artificially raise electoral temperatures for the sake of a headline.
Voters will have to cope with confusion, constructed realities, and attempts to trigger suppressed prejudices and biases. News media can help to get them to the ballot box with their sanity intact by keeping matters in proportion, and by demonstrating to the public that they, not social media, are sources to be trusted.
I thoughtful and perceptive pice. However there is one issue that you omit. Many consumers of ‘conventional media’ believe that the majority of reporters / commentators are biased to the ‘progressive’ left. Thus to get a balanced view they go on-line and are exposed to the unmediated comments that you, sensibly, condemn.
If the ‘conventional media’ employed more right of centre workers it might become more balanced and restore relevancy.
My experience was that those on the left accused us of being right wing and those on the right accused us of being left wing. I was also called “the Opposition” by prime ministers from both major parties. People tend to see anyone who does not mirror their worldview as being opposed to them. That is one of the real challenges in improving public trust in the media. It is vital that differing views are reflected.
Thoughtful and comprehensive as always, Gavin. But I wonder if anything has changed, really. My parents dismissed newspaper reporting as “paper talk” and were much more influenced by what their friends and business contacts said. A survey I recall from 20 years ago showed word-of-mouth info still outpaced any media as a source of “common knowledge”. I’d be intrigued to know if that latter phenomenon has changed in the last decade. You would know, I’m sure.
The new dimension Jim is a level of vitriolic polarization fed by the no-consequences attitude to social media. The rhetoric has changed. Where, in the past, extreme comments were restricted to the ends of the spectrum they have moved increasingly into what used to be a reasonably civilized space. Views have become fixed and, as a result, disinformation and extreme speech aimed at manipulating a fixed view of the world has a fertile ground in which to work.