All of the chapters in this part explore the role of government regulation in addressing online misinformation, or lack thereof. The authors of this part explore timely questions: Do we need radical regulatory reform to hold social media platforms accountable and support journalism? Do nation-states need to intervene to protect vulnerable groups against the violence resulting from the circulation of hate propaganda? Or do we need to preserve—or even increase—the openness of our communication channels by preventing governments from interfering? Ultimately, the authors of this part disagree on the best strategy, with three authors making the case that policies—rather than continued industry examples of “self-regulation”—are necessary for addressing misinformation, while one author pushes us to consider the drawbacks of government meddling in matters of speech.
The first chapter in this part is by media studies scholar Victor Pickard, “Confronting the Misinformation Society: Facebook’s ‘Fake News’ Is a Symptom of Unaccountable Monopoly Power.” Pickard’s chapter begins by examining the structural nature of the fake news phenomenon, and it concludes with suggestions for radical reform. According to Pickard, various forms of misinformation and propaganda, whether hatched by governments or the likes of Fox News, have been circulating through media for decades, if not centuries. But the profound media power residing in one monopolistic platform, namely, Facebook, arguably presents a unique challenge to democratic societies. Even as Facebook comes under increased public pressure to be held accountable for the misinformation it purveys and profits from, a core problem is often overlooked: the proliferation of fake news is symptomatic of an unregulated news monopoly that is governed solely by profit imperatives. Thus, Pickard argues that solutions will remain elusive until we adequately diagnose this underlying problem.
The second chapter in this part is by communication scholar Stephanie Ricker Schulte, “Fixing Fake News: Self-Regulation and Technological Solutionism.” Schulte’s chapter places solutions to the fake news problem in two historical contexts: American media self-regulation and technological solutionism. First, Schulte argues that mechanisms deployed by internet platforms for self-regulating fake news content—including flagging, fact-checking, and content moderation—“make sense” in part because the history of media regulation in the United States has been one dominated by self-regulation. Time after time, through internal mechanisms—organizations such as the National Association of Broadcasters and industry agreements such as the Hays Code—media producers, distributors, and outlets walked back content deemed problematic or outrageous, shifting content on radio channels, film screens, and television broadcasts to diminish public and political outrage.
Second, Schulte tracks the history of “solutionism,” the idea that technology can solve humanity’s problems and make life “frictionless.” Technological solutionism plays heavily in the fake news regulation conversation in part because fake news is understood as a technological problem or, at the very least, as a social problem solvable by technology. Ultimately, Schulte argues that, inserted into these two contexts, self-regulatory efforts put forward by internet platforms “make sense” only because these solutions continue the pattern of market (not government) regulation and because they perpetuate the illusion that technology is the best solution to humanity’s problems.
Cherian George, a journalism and media studies scholar, contributes the third chapter in this part, “The Scourge of Disinformation-Assisted Hate Propaganda.” According to George, probably no genre of fake news is more dangerous than disinformation campaigns that target socially marginalized communities. There is nothing new about such hate propaganda; it has been central to the communication strategy of groups engaged in territorial conquests, genocides, pogroms, and other crimes against humanity throughout history. In less extreme cases, groups using identity politics as a means to accumulate power deploy it to scapegoat “politically dispensable” minorities. In this chapter, George analyzes recent elections in India and Indonesia to understand how these disinformation campaigns work. To combat such propaganda, George contends that news media need to trace the interests behind them, in much the same way that investigative journalists follow the money to uncover corruption. Ultimately, though, George argues that addressing propaganda requires the protection of an activist state that intervenes to uphold people’s rights to live free of discrimination and violence.
The final chapter in this part is by communication scholar Paul Levinson, “Fake News and Open Channels of Communication.” Levinson argues that the ultimate antidote to fake news is the myriad sources we have to check any news sources, whether newspapers, cable news, or somewhere online. Levinson cautions us that the well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) attempts of governments to address misinformation problems like fake news through the regulation of social media will undermine sources of legitimate news. To Levinson, the best defense we have against misinformation is keeping all of our channels of information wide open, not only to the dissemination of fake news, but to the dissemination of truthful reporting.
Wajeeha Ahmad, “Dealing with Fake News: Policy and Technical Measures” (Internet Policy Research Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2018), https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2018/04/Fake-news-recommendations-Wajeeha-MITs-IPRI.pdf.
Daniel Funke, “A Guide to Anti-Misinformation Actions around the World,” Poynter, accessed June 17, 2019, https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/anti-misinformation-actions/.
Philip M. Napoli, “What If More Speech Is No Longer the Solution? First Amendment Theory Meets Fake News and the Filter Bubble,” Federal Communications Law Journal 70, no. 1 (2018): 57–103, http://www.fclj.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/70.1-Napoli.pdf.