Too much information: when censorship is not the only weapon against democracy

The first thing Vladimir Putin did when he lost control of events on the ground in Ukraine was to shut down the watchful eye of independent media outlets and crank up the distribution of propaganda on the outlets controlled by the state — like TV.

There, as Peter Pomerantsev observed in his Putinesquely-titled book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, “reality” can be scripted by the dark forces inside the Kremlin: “Fake opposition parties engage in fake opposition to those who rule, a fake justice system goes through the motions of the legal process, and the fake television news shapes what Russia’s 143 million citizens are allowed to see.”

But silencing the media isn’t the only way despots, demagogues, charlatans and other bad actors can stop it shining light in dark corners and speaking truth to power. Another is to ridicule or question the good faith of opponents, amplify “news” that’s a cross between a game show and a partisan football match, and throw in enough self-serving lies, deepfakes and false flags that citizens no longer know what is true, and who they can trust to give them the accurate take on reality they need to engage in voting or other civic activity.

This was Putin’s media strategy for helping Trump get elected in 2016, and it’s the cornerstone of his campaign to undermine domestic and international support for Ukraine now. Indeed, the latest propaganda being pushed by pro-Russian social media accounts is so devilish, and devilishly confusing, I’m going to let CNN’s fact-checker David Dale explain it.

[It’s a sneaky face that] tries to make it look like the media broadcast a video of Ukranian crisis actors …pretending to be dead …[But] the footage is not from Ukraine and has not actually been broadcast by the media as if it was …[Instead] someone copied the audio and the onscreen text from an NBC report about Ukraine on the first day of the Russian invasion and attached that text and that audio to completely unrelated news footage from Vienna, Austria three weeks prior … of a climate change protest where protesters laid down in body bags.

The point of this deceptive mash-up, says Dale, is to falsely accuse Ukrainians and the Western media of shamelessly tricking the world (which it didn’t) into believing there’s a war going on in Ukraine (which there is) that’s causing casualties (which it is) when, the author of the propaganda is suggesting, the war and casualties are false flag operations by the West (which they aren’t).

If this doesn’t do your head in, nothing will. Which is precisely the point. To make citizens so confused, so suspicious, so disillusioned and enraged, that they give up. Which for the dark side is almost as good as getting you to believe and amplify their confections at dinner parties and on social media.  

How can we ensure that the information democratic citizens rely on is accurate, and that deceptive and misleading information is prohibited and its purveyors held accountable? Before the internet, the answer (in addition to legal prohibitions on inciting violence, defamation and violating intellectual property) was professionalism and norms backed by industry codes of conduct.

At the start of the digital revolution the desire to give American tech start-ups a competitive advantage, and all the kumbaya talk about the internet’s capacity to bring the world closer together, drowned out thoughts of regulation.

These days few have a beef about regulation in the abstract. Yet disagreement abounds about how to mitigate the many harms without placing too many curbs on free expression — or causing too much political fallout from media tsars like Zuckerberg who seem to enjoy setting their own standards that they regularly walk past, libertarian hacktivists who worship at the altar of total transparency, and media companies who can’t tolerate more disruption to business models that have finally learned to accommodate and take advantage of the existing digital landscape.

Indeed, for some, provision of what used to be the definition of the product called news — the provision of verified truth — has become a point of difference.

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The Western press has rightly expressed horror at Putin’s further tightening of what was already a sustained crackdown on press freedom in Russia, and praised heroic efforts by outlets like the BBC and The New York Times to find ways around it. 

But censorship isn’t the only way to defend an autocracy or destroy a democracy. Information overload in an opaque and unverified environment does that too. We need to bite the bullet and do what we must to ensure voters have the truth and trust they need in a democracy.