We are living in the golden age of free speech, but we are also living in the golden age of misinformation.

The last 18 months has been filled with headlines about the threats of new technology to contemporary life. Politics is being hacked by malicious and untraceable botnets. People are becoming more and more divided as they pick and choose information sources that reinforce their beliefs

We live in an era of massive risk and massive opportunity, as Anthony Giddens put it. Billions of people use the same communications networks, more or less at zero cost. Almost anybody can read about what’s going on almost everywhere. I can record a podcast in Brussels or Berlin with friends in two different cities in the UK.

It is worth stepping back and appreciating just how unprecedented this all is.

There has never been communication technology that has either spread so widely or so quickly as the internet. Each new communications revolution gets a little faster. The alphabet took well over 2000 years to develop into a codified system. The printing press was invented in 1439 but the Renaissance, that explosion of knowledge sharing associated with the technology, really only kicked off in earnest in the 17th century.

The internet as we know it was invented in 1989. By the end of 2017, 54.4% of the entire population of the earth had internet access. Writing was invented around 3000BC, yet still today 17% of the global population is illiterate — meaning they still don’t have access to that technology. The internet is being adopted at a breathtaking rate.

What’s particularly surprising about that is the internet has not simply spread to rich people in rich countries. It has spread much more broadly and deeply than virtually any other technology. 70% of young people use the internet as do 43% of people living in developing countries. Even the gender gap is relatively small when compared to literacy: two-thirds of all the illiterate people in the world are women, whereas only 12% more men have access to the internet than women.

And all this has happened in less than 30 years.

It’s no surprise, then, that the world has started to notice that this brand new digital information network isn’t exactly compatible with pre-existing societal norms or institutions. People are basically struggling to keep up with all the changes that the internet has brought them.

This week, we spoke to Anthony Skews, author of Politics for the New Dark Age, which examines some of the big buzz words of contemporary politics — fake news, post truth, polarization — all of which can be traced to the new online environment. He writes from a evolutionary perspective of how we “as political animals” can best adapt to the environment around us to make collective decisions and maintain societal order.

It’s very difficult. We can now interact with one another totally anonymously, which is nice when it comes to avoiding censorship, but very hard when it comes to all those non-verbal parts of communication: reading body language, having a common context, understanding differences in culture. There’s no way for us to pick up on that online and so we end up screaming at each other or disengaging entirely.

The most effective way of winning a political argument now is to bombard people with misinformation until nobody is sure what is real or what is really worth worrying about. Propaganda in the digital era isn’t about convincing people you’re right. It’s about convincing them nobody is right, so why bother engaging at all? That’s the true threat to democracy.

How do we change this?

People realize there is a problem.

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer* results showed that people are extremely worried about fake news. 7⁄ 10 surveyed worry about it ‘being used as a weapon’. On top of that, trust in platforms declined heavily while trust in journalists jumped. This signals to all those regulators (especially in the EU) that users are finally turning against the tech giants that dominate the online environment.

A reckoning is coming, as I have written about before.

Last month, Facebook changed its algorithm so we all started seeing more posts from friends and family with much less stuff from publishers. The change was announced on January 12th and by the 13th users were seeing changes. Life comes at you fast when you’re an algorithm.

Misinformation is more interesting and more divisive than the truth. A comment chain filled with white hot takes and endless arguments don’t tend to stem from Reuters breaking news articles. As a former Facebook product manager put it in 2016,

“Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement [and] as we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging.”

One of the reasons Facebook have made this decision is they no longer want to be the battleground of online politics. They have been eating shit over fake news, abuse and political advertising for 18 months and they want out. However, politicians pressuring big tech companies to deal with these issues themselves (rather than legislating and regulating) is pretty damn dystopian, as Mark Scott, Chief Technology Correspondent at Politico, pointed out:

“In this new era of global online censorship, tough calls will have to be made between free speech and online safety, and elected officials, not opaque tech companies, must be the ones to judge what content crosses the line.”

The other part to this story is ourselves. Away from regulators and digital businesses adapting to the new environment, we all have to. We have to get better at picking up misinformation. We have to be patient and more forgiving when we talk to people online, as well as being more skeptical about the information and information providers we’re being exposed to.

There’s always a teething period with new technology. As Zaynep Tufecki wrote in an excellent WIRED article, we’re only at the beginning of this process.

“Facebook is only 13 years old, Twitter 11, and even Google is but 19. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones.”

We’ve spent weeks talking about the rise and fall of the Neoliberal era — it seems very likely that what comes after it isn’t some shiny new ideology we can all be sold on but an era defined by adaptation to digital communication technology.

As Warren said last week, history is far from over. It only just rebooted.

*Full disclosure: I work for Edelman in Brussels, although not on the Trust Barometer.

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