The New Mexico Civil Liberties Union released a set of public service announcements (PSA) warning about the misuse of technology in 1974. During its short run, the campaign targeted increasingly pervasive surveillance and attempts to manipulate the public by government and private corporations. In the wake of its technological growth, cult filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, who directed the PSA, cautioned society would be reduced to mindless automatons and puppets to authoritarianism. More than 30 years after Reggio’s PSA, has mankind heeded the warning?
During Reggio’s time, this idea might have sounded far-fetched, but when certain Russian groups influence United States (US) elections with targeted Facebook ads and armies of fake accounts systematically target a dissenting opinion, it’s time for mankind to ask how close it is to a technological dystopia.
While Facebook’s data breach scandal in the US and the #FakeNews hearings in the Philippines are still largely inconclusive, one thing is for certain: the public cannot afford to remain ignorant any longer. Data is power and he who wields it is king.
Is fake news hurting fake democracy?
Since Buzzfeed media editor Craig Silverman outed over 140 pro-Trump fake news websites registered in Macedonia in 2016, “fake news,” which Silverman loosely coined in 2014, in its current resurgence became a popular trend in mainstream media. The websites, according to Silverman, systematically produced and circulated headlines on Facebook engineered to go viral like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President” or “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary E-mail Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.”
With such controversial headlines, research reflected from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018 showed fake news is 70 times more likely to be shared on social media than verified stories.
In the Philippines, the world’s social media capital according to management platforms Hootsuite and We are Social Ltd., accusations of fake news remain a hotly-contested topic surrounding President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration. Indeed, a quick rundown of recently-exposed fake and unverified news websites released by Wikipedia, revealed at least eight explicitly cater to Duterte supporters, among these are dutertedefender.com, dutertetrendingnews.blogspot.com, du30newsinfo.com, dutertenewswatch.com, and others. Worse, however, is how Presidential Communications Operations Office Asec. Mocha Uson herself has been repeatedly called out for sharing fake news stories on Facebook.
In February 2018, Dr. Jonathan Ong and Dr. Jason Cabañes, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Leeds (U.K.) respectively, published an insider study of fake news and fake troll social media accounts in the country. The 12-month research titled “Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines,” came to the conclusion that fake news and political trolling is a massive industry in the Philippines—and everyone is in it.
The industry’s unseen operators spread black propaganda, smear campaigns, and attacks on political dissenters on social media, while echoing the message of their own candidate/s. They work in highly hierarchical organizations directed by local public relations firms. Without naming any parties, the aforementioned study pointed at evidence of “systematic manipulation of political discussions on Facebook and Twitter by various players across the political spectrum.”
No easy fix
The cure to fake news may be worse than the disease. Senate Bill 1492 or the “Anti-Fake News Act of 2017” by Senator Joel Villanueva, which seeks stiffer punishments for fake news, may not pass because it seemingly curtails the right to freedom of speech. Meanwhile, other groups called increased efforts such as the act as dangerous because the Philippine government has not agreed on a definition for fake news in the first place.
In a forum at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in October 2017, journalism professor and VERA Files fact-checker Yvonne Chua warned that additional legislation could make matters worse, pointing out how laws have often been unjustly used against the media.
“If you examine the history of these laws, while they can be used, of course, on a person, because it doesn’t have to be media, it has often been used on the media,” Chua said in the forum.
The dilemma now becomes evident: if fake news has not been properly defined, who is to say what is fake or not?
Advancements in technology need not be defended. Rather, the purposes to which man employs them is a reflection of society. If society does not value transparency and honesty, no number of fake news hearings will solve the problem. Is democracy still truly free while fake news manipulates unwilling victims?
As for Reggio’s PSA, they may not have been fully appreciated in his time, but the message rings truer than it ever has today.
Photo by Kel Santos
This article was originally published in The Benildean Vol. 4 No. 2: Preservation.
