Commons report finds pernicious tech giants precipitating ‘democratic crisis’

In a first interim report in its Disinformation and ‘fake news’ inquiry, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee outlines a series of recommendations to tackle the problem of disinformation and fake news facing the whole world.

Damian Collins MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “We are facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy – based on the systematic manipulation of data to support the relentless targeting of citizens, without their consent, by campaigns of disinformation and messages of hate.

“In this inquiry we have pulled back the curtain on the secretive world of the tech giants, which have acted irresponsibly with the vast quantities of data they collect from their users. Despite concerns being raised, companies like Facebook made it easy for developers to scrape user data and to deploy it in other campaigns without their knowledge or consent.

“Throughout our inquiry these companies have tried to frustrate scrutiny and obfuscated in their answers. The light of transparency must be allowed to shine on their operations and they must be made responsible, and liable, for the way in which harmful and misleading content is shared on their sites.”

Mr Collins described “coordinated campaigns by Russian agencies” to influence how people around the world vote. Russian activity includes advertising through Facebook during elections in breach of domestic laws.

Adverts from Russia have been made to look like they came from users’ own countries, with no information available about the true advertiser at the time.

Mr Collins said: “I believe what we have discovered so far is the tip of the iceberg. There needs to be far greater analysis done to expose the way advertising and fake accounts are being used on social media to target people with disinformation during election periods. The ever-increasing sophistication of these campaigns, which will soon be helped by developments in augmented reality technology, make this an urgent necessity.”

The interim report sets out a series of recommendations, including; making the tech companies take greater responsibility for misleading and harmful content on their sites; providing greater transparency for users on the origin of content that has been presented to them; raising funding from the tech sector to provide more media literacy training in schools; and calling for an international coalition to act against campaigns of disinformation from Russian agencies and their networks, whose purpose, Mr Collins said “is to disrupt our democracy”.