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I should say what I'm going to talk about tonight is out of a was part of a book on the ethics of cyber of cyber security,

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which I'm writing with a computer scientist by the name of Terry Bosso Meyer.

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Terry, unfortunately, can't be here. He's the man who knows about all the technical details.

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So any hard questions that I can't answer inevitably would be ones that he would have answered if he'd if he'd been here.

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But nevertheless, I have to take full responsibility for what I'm about to say.

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Well, I did get some assistance from Terry for this particular presentation.

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Okay. So I'll just quickly run through what I'm going to the structure of the presentation.

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So, you know, roughly what's in store for you? It's in sort of four parts.

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Depending on time, I may have to traverse some of these parts more quickly than might otherwise be desirable.

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The first part is basically looking at what the nature of the problem in this area is,

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because I think it's a kind of collection of sort of set of complex set of problems.

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Secondly, I'm going to define the three key notions fake news, hate speech and proper and political propaganda.

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It's political propaganda. That's my focus. And I take it that fake news and hate speech are typically components of political propaganda.

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I won't spend too much time on these definitions since this is a sort of philosophical Chesnut point of area.

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In Part C, the third part, I'll talk about how the right to freedom of communication is to be understood,

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because I think the the dominant tradition in philosophy, at least in the analytic world, is derived from four mil.

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And I don't want to divert too much from, but I think that we need a slightly more expansive notion of freedom of communication.

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And of course, the key problem is that on the one hand, we want to give a lot of weight to the moral right of freedom of communication.

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We want to allow people to to express themselves and so on.

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But on the other hand, we've got this problem because a lot of people are abusing that, right?

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Giving us hate speech, giving us fake news and spouting propaganda.

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And so we want to restrict that. But how do we how do we square the circle?

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Okay. So I'll talk a little bit about the the notion of relevant notion of freedom of communication.

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Then in Part D, I'm going to try and say think some things about how we could go about countering political proper

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propaganda whilst in doing so respecting hopefully this right to freedom of communication,

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but at least having some impact on reducing the amount of fake news, hate speech and and political propaganda.

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And a particular thing to keep in mind here is if you see that on the board

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there under D one is the role of what I refer to as epistemic institutions.

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This is sort of the philosophical terms of the notion of epistemic, but it's basically just means institutions concerned with knowledge.

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So if one thinks of schools, universities, but also the press, for example,

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that concern to investigate matters, to figure out what's actually going on out there, but also, of course,

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parliaments and committee, parliamentary committees,

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because it ought to be their business to try to think through what would be the best policies helping themselves, of course, to expert advice.

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But they should be, as it were, deliberative bodies and therefore to that extent epistemic in my sense.

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So it's a fairly broad ranging notion of the epistemic that I have in mind.

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Right. So Part II is sort of unpacking the problem.

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Okay. So putting things somewhat simplistically, what we've had in in recent times is the development of a whole range of social media platforms,

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Facebook, Twitter, etc. and they're now used by literally billions of communicators world wide as I related tech developments such in the.

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I think these figures such as Google and so on and the advent of these these tech, tech giants and the underpinning technology has, of course,

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been remarkable in terms of the unprecedented flows of information, the capacity to to find out things,

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but also in terms of the capacity of people to exercise their right to communicate with one another.

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What is of particular interest to me is the right to to communicate,

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not simply with anyone on the Internet or with your friends on Facebook or something.

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What I'm interested in is because I'm interested in political propaganda.

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I'm interested in the moral right to public communication.

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Public communication. And by public communication, I don't just mean as a way your private communications, your friends.

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There are two features of public communication I would draw attention to.

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The notion is rather more complex than than this. But there are two features that I think are worth drawing attention to.

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First of all, the message communicated becomes a message that goes to and is intended to go to a large number of people.

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But each of those each of those persons who is communicated to knows that a whole lot of other people have been communicated to.

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So it's not just that you've been communicated with, but that you've grasped this message in someone else's grasp, especially.

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So it's that we all know that we've all grasped this message.

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So there's a there's that dimension to it, which is sometimes referred to as in the literature is common knowledge,

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which is I know that something you know, that something, I know that you know that something's wrong and so forth.

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The other feature of this, what I'm calling public communication,

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I just draw attention to is that it to say that it's public communication doesn't simply mean it's in the public domain,

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in the sense that in principle you got access that is, you know,

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so there must be there's a lot of information in the public records that in principle is in the public domain, but no one ever bothers to look at it.

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So I'm looking at public community. I'm thinking of public communication in the sense of of message that messages and information out there,

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that's that's, as I say, visible, highly, pretty highly visible.

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So we're all kind of aware of it. It's not just a question of the capacity to access it.

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Okay. Unfortunately, in addition to this, in increasing our capacity to to come to know things and to communicate,

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there's also been an exponential increase in the topic of this talk, namely hate speech, fake news and political propaganda.

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And as and relatedly, there's been an attempt, considerable empowerment of extremist political groups,

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bearing in mind I'm interested in political propaganda,

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notably groups like Islamic State and so on, and also the capacity it has enabled various political actors to intervene in democratic processes.

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And one thinks here of Cambridge, at Cambridge I think also the interventions in relation to Brexit,

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but more recently in the European elections on these these the capacity to intervene has been facilitated by not only by the Internet obviously,

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but by social media and by some of these AI techniques of machine learning, for example.

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And if you think of particular example of hate speech,

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that's often drawing attention to this is the the Facebook hate speech emanating from Myanmar military in relation to the Rohingya in Burma in May,

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in Myanmar, which evidently led to or was facilitated the murder of many of those individuals.

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Okay. So. If we come back to this notion of public communication and the kind of sphere of public communication,

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and I suppose the paradigm that people sometimes have in mind,

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or at least people who've studied the history of Western civilisation,

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the history of Western philosophy or whatever they think of Athens and the forum.

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And, you know, there's a relatively small number of people who are citizens.

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There are only males. There had to be aristocrats and so forth. But there's a small group of them and they get all sit around the forum and

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they could talk to one another and everyone had a chance to speak and so on.

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And so you had this kind of this notion of public communication, such that everyone could speak, as it were,

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at least in in in theory, if not in practice, to pretty much everyone else they could publicly communicate was a public space.

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So one of the things that seems to have happened insofar as we've had a public space in that sense of public sphere, at least in that.

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So if you take the U.K., the kind of public sphere created to some extent by organisations like the BBC,

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where most people in the U.K. aware of certain developments they get everyone gets the same,

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roughly speaking, the same news and so on, and knows what's going on.

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That has been or at least that was formerly the case to a considerable extent.

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That's been undermined to some extent by these new developments.

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So there's been a kind of splitting or fragmentation of this public sphere,

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and you've got a whole range of different audiences that are focussed on other members of their narrow

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audience and don't necessarily get the same news or in the same things as members of some other audience.

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So you've got a development, or at least the the the considerable increase in so-called narrowcasting versus broadcast communications.

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And to some extent, if we look at the international sphere in the world as it's come to be with globalisation,

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it's clear that there are a whole range of common problems that we all, as sort of member of the human race,

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need to know something about and one thinks of climate change and so on.

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So one would one would have thought we would want a kind of, as it were,

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a sort of global public sphere of communication to so that we can think about

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and be informed about these problems that we confront collectively as humans.

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But unfortunately, there's been a kind of a kind of Balkanisation, if you like, in relation to the public.

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That's where the global public sphere, partly because we've got some nation states such as,

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say, China and Russia, who want to slow down or censor certain sorts of information.

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They don't want Chinese people to have access, for example, to websites outside China.

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The Russians, again, are looking at doing things in this space.

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So there's a kind of fragmentation Balkanisation going on in terms of where the international public sphere.

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And so the upshot of this is that perhaps somewhat paradoxically,

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the important development that seems to have arisen as a consequence of social media,

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the Internet and so on, is that the pre-existing public spheres of communication have been to some extent, sort of splintered and fragmented.

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And the what one might have expected, namely the development of out of a global sphere of public communication,

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has been much less than one might have thought, and certainly less than what one might think would be desirable.

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Okay. Now, aside from this notion of a public sphere of communication and the idea of people having rights to communicate to

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the public as opposed to simply being able to communicate with their friends or in an interpersonal communication,

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these this the maintenance of of public communication,

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if it's if it's to work and succeed and and be a development for the good of humanity or the good of nation states or for good of organisations,

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is it will need to be communication which is compliant with various epistemic and moral norms.

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In other words, that is regularities in behaviour that people are committed to.

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So for example, if you take a simple. Out of the norm of aiming at the truth, of trying to tell the truth.

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This is a pretty fundamental norm. Because if it's if we if if all of us with a breach, this norm, if we were all to say, well,

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I'm not going to bother telling the truth, and you said decided you weren't going to bother telling the truth.

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Communication would quickly start to break down because I wouldn't I wouldn't trust you to tell the truth.

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You wouldn't trust me to tell the truth. And so these norms are obviously of great importance.

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Other kinds of norms that have developed, which are under pressure, would be norms like the not the norm, that you don't defame people.

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You don't go around trashing people, saying false things about them.

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And of course, there are laws about body of law development in relation to this.

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But in the case of the sort of unregulated or relatively unregulated Internet,

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you can get away with a lot of the things that you wouldn't be able to know I wouldn't have been able to get away with previously.

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Another kind of norm is in relation to the distinction between factual or truth aiming or communication,

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which is concerned with how things are as opposed to mere entertainment.

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And we think that's an important distinction that we want to hold onto.

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And when someone says something, we want to know, well,

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are you are you saying something because you you believe this to be true or are you just trying to have fun or this is just a silly,

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silly, entertaining claim?

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And that distinction between truth on the one hand and entertainment on the other seems to have been coming under increasing pressure.

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It was coming under pressure before with phenomena like infotainment that it's becoming it's coming under greater pressure.

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Okay. So it's very important that we attend to these epistemic and moral norms of communication.

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And the the lack of compliance with them is very problematic in terms of the quality of of public communication.

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There are two general ways in which we try to ensure compliance with these norms.

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One way is to have laws and enforceable laws and regulations for the most serious breaches.

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Laws against defamation, laws against incitement to violence and so on.

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But those laws and regulations in and of themselves are not going to be sufficient.

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We also need people to have collectively attitudes that of respect for those norms.

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They know what the norms are,

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and I think they're important and they will express disapproval and pull people up if and when they breach those those norms.

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And of course, if you've got the the the greater the amount of non-compliance, the weaker those norms become.

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If you get enough people disobeying the laws, enough people just give up on telling the truth.

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Oh, well, you know, you've got to tell the truth. I'm going to tell the truth. No, it doesn't really matter.

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And so on. Then the norm starts to be undermined.

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And of course, if you have state actors deliberately such as, say, Russia,

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in relation to various matters, or to take a look at an example near to home, if you've got, say,

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the American president who's quite happy to tell lies and put about say false things about people willy nilly,

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then this is very unhelpful in terms of maintenance of these these norms, these epistemic and moral norms.

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Okay. So we're coming to the end of this section.

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I said earlier that I thought there wasn't just a simple problem of freedom of communication versus banning or prohibiting hate speech,

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fake news and propaganda.

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So perhaps now I can draw your attention to a sort of set of different problems that have emerged in the process of of this discussion.

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So one thing we've got to do is figure out what actually is the difference between politically motivated fake news and another news that may be false,

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for example. But isn't it essentially fake news?

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What is the difference between propaganda and political claims that may be motivated by by political interests?

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But nevertheless, we might want to say they're not actually propaganda.

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So there's a range of questions in that space.

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Another kind of question is that we've touched on is what is the nature and extent of the moral right of freedom,

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of communication with the where is the right to freedom and stop and restrictions in relation to what one can say start yet another kind of ethical.

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This is a kind of ethical principle.

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The question would be what are the kinds of principles we knew we need to use when we if we going to regulate content in cyberspace?

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So are we going to help ourselves to principle, necessity, proportionality, Facebook,

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for example, when it decides that it wants it thinks that certain material should be taken down,

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helps itself to community standards and of course, censors people who censor communications have always helped themselves to community standards.

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But the question then arises with what are the what are the community standards?

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And which community ought to be the one that we ought to be referencing when we say that this does or doesn't meet community standards?

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Another kind of set of set of questions, concerns what ought to who ought to decide these questions?

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So it's one thing to say we've decided what the definition of fake news we decided we want to make it illegal.

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But then there's the question as to who gets to decide what is or isn't fake news at the moment.

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For example, some of the big tech companies themselves, Facebook, are making a lot of those decisions.

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Is this is this the way we should be going?

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Are they the right the right institutional actors to be making those sorts of decisions?

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And then finally, there's a whole range of questions to do with how how are we going to respond to this?

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How are we going to combat this? Presumably, we want to reduce hate speech.

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We want to reduce fake news and political propaganda, but what are we going to do to reduce it?

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And the critical question there is what are we going to do?

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What policies we want to put in place? What regulations have we got to introduce consistent with liberal democratic principles?

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Because it may be that we can we can reduce a lot of these things, but in so doing,

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undermine principles we take to be constitutive of liberal democracy.

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I guess in Part B, I might skim through part B reasonably quickly.

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It's a sort of a lot of definitions. So fake news, of course, is news.

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It's so it's not simply things that are false.

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It's something that is in the public in the public sphere, as as I indicated earlier, which suggest to you that it's it's news.

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It is false. And it's news that is not believed by the originator.

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So it might be it might not be disbelieved by the originator, but as long as the originator doesn't think it doesn't believe it,

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then I suggest that it's that is a condition for being fake news.

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But the key condition I would draw your attention to is that fake news purports to be true.

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That is, it presents itself as being true. And that's quite, quite an important defining condition, I suggest, of fake news.

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Fake news is, of course, problematic, since a lot of it's false.

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All of it's false, but it's likely to be believed by many people that's going to be a problem.

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And it has a lot of potentially bad political consequences, some of which I mentioned earlier.

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What about political hate speech? Well, political hate speech has been actually quite a difficult concept to define.

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And there's a lot of differences of opinion in different jurisdictions about what it is and whether or not it be banned and so on and so forth.

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I would suggest to you that it's it's it's speech that is intended to incite

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hatred against some group and that it has a reasonable chance of inciting hatred,

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even if it doesn't actually do so. And in the case of if it's a political hate speech, it'll have an ulterior political purpose.

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But a critical component of hate speech, as I understand it, is that the truth of what said in the hate speech?

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In the hate speech, even if even if it does have some truthful content, that it's not the truth.

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It's of interest to the to the speaker of hate speech. The the the interest is in is inciting interest, inciting hatred.

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So that's the that's the motive. Okay.

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And again, it's obviously problematic.

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It's likely to be false and it's harmful, as we saw the various groups in the case of the Rohingya in Burma and so on.

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It also has some other characteristics. For example, it's likely to generate conflict and it undermines an important liberal democratic value,

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namely fraternity, which people often don't think about.

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These days I think of freedom. I think of equality. But fraternity, the sense in which a political community has to work together,

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respect one another in relation to moving forward to pursue policies for the common good is obviously very unhelpful in relation to that.

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And of course, fake news, hate speech and cyber space have been particularly harmful given the community reach of the Internet,

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the communicative reach of the Internet and the power of these social media platforms.

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Okay. What about political propaganda? Well, political propaganda is, I suggest, public communication in the service of a political ideology.

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What is political ideology? I think here it's important to hold on to a distinction between political ideology and systems of political ideas.

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The two things are often collapsed and people start talking about a political set of political ideas as ideology.

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I think it's important to resist that.

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Like political ideas, ideology is a structured set of beliefs and assumptions, and it serves like political ideas for political purposes.

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But I think the critical difference is that ideology only exists because it serves political a political purpose, and not because, as it were,

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the world of reality, the social, economic, legal, whatever reality is, as the ideology says, research, not ideology, is not motivated by truth.

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It's motivated purely by political purpose.

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And of course, in the current environment, in the cyber world,

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political ideology has been able to rely on the power of the Internet and social media in harness with a lot of psychologically based,

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manipulative marketing techniques to great effect, as, for example, is evident in the Cambridge Analytica scandal mentioned earlier.

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Okay, so part C would go through this reasonably quickly as well to get to Part D.

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One of the points about the right to public communication in a mass society is that it's kind of necessarily in direct because the societies,

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there's so many people. It's something of an illusion to think that everyone can communicate with everyone else.

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There's just too many people.

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So what's historically happened is that there's a kind of people's communication with with one another is mediated by various institutions,

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including notably the press, print and TV and so on.

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Now, with the advent of social media and the Internet, there's now this capacity to engage in direct public communication with everyone as,

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for example, TRUMP But there are a lot of other ordinary people do.

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And this has created the, I would suggest, the kind of illusion that we can now return to the this kind of image, as I mentioned earlier,

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of the Athenian sort of forum, where we were all sitting around and we can all talk to one another because in principle,

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any of us can reach anyone else directly. Well, I think this is an illusion because just far too many people.

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And so in actual fact, if you if you take, for example, Trump's got apparently 3 million or so members of his audience.

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He can regularly and does regularly communicate with all 3 million.

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And some of the others some of the members of that 3 million audience could communicate and do communicate occasionally to the total of the 3 million.

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But the three not every one of that 3 million can possibly communicate to all the other 3 million.

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So it's something of an illusion to think that we've as we're overcome through these for social media and the Internet,

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that fundamental problem that confronts mass societies, although it has certainly extended the capacity to communicate,

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including to directly communicate for some minority here,

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we I think we need to distinguish between the right to communicate and the right to be a follower of communications.

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Everyone can be a right can receive the communications of Trump, but few can actually be to communicate all.

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Okay. So what is this right to public communication?

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What is it actually being reduced to in in the contemporary setting?

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Well, I suggest that the the right the public communication, which we think is an individual right, that I have to communicate to the public at large.

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It's a right that you have to communicate to the public at large. And so we think it's a right everyone has.

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I suggest that that right and I'm talking now about public political communication has in effect, been reduced to the following.

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It's not so much a right as an opportunity to compete with others for a public audience.

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So you don't have a right to communicate, communicate everyone.

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You do have an opportunity to compete with a whole lot of other people for a large audience.

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But unfortunately, when you compete with others to communicate with a large audience,

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you do so under conditions of unfair competition because you don't have the resources,

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the wherewithal that a lot of organisations or people that are backed by organisations

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have to collect all of the data to use machine learning techniques and so on,

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and so to refine your message and and so on and so forth. So it's targeted to certain people.

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And so, so unfortunately for you and for me, you're competing under conditions of unfair competition.

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A third point, which I've already touched on, is that unfortunately, the norms governing this communication, a frequently flouted,

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they are frequently not complied with, and the space of public communication is much less regulated both in terms of laws and regulations,

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but also in terms of ordinary social attitudes than was the case before and in exercising or trying to exercise your your

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opportunity to compete with other audiences in conditions of unfair competition in which norms governing communication flouted.

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This whole process is facilitated by the social media platforms on which which you use to make your communications.

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And those platforms are far from being, as it were,

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entirely neutral platforms that are only interested in making sure that everyone

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has a fair shot at communicating whatever it is that they want to communicate,

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are actually interested in ensuring that they make the most money and drive audiences to that material, which is going to make them more money.

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So the idea isn't that they're going to going to adjudicate matters,

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adjudicate things in the manner in which the most important political information or the most

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truthful or the most accurate political information is gained by the greatest number of people.

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Rather, what they're interested in is ensuring that the kind of material that's pumped around maximises the cash flow.

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So that isn't very helpful either in terms of the quality and the the compliance with with moral and epistemic norms.

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Okay. So if that's the general situation, the specific problem, let me remind you again, is on the one hand,

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we've got political matter to fake news, hate speech and so on, which is exploding exponentially, is a sort of exponentially developed.

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So there's a huge amount of it out there.

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But on the other hand, which is creating a lot of problems, on the other hand, we have, as I say, this is important, right to freely communicate.

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So what I want to do now is, is take a little bit of a step back from this right to formally communicate.

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So the first thing, when people think about their right to communicate, they think of an individual right to communicate.

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That I have to you and you have to me.

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And so I've suggested that that's not quite right, that what you've actually got, if you're talking about public communication,

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is a right because you can't actually communicate with everyone and everyone can't actually communicate with you.

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It's more like you've got a right to if you've got a right to say there opportunity

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to compete with others to get your communication to a larger audience.

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So what is the but what is the sort of fundamental right that we're interested here in,

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in protecting what what's the important right that we want to make sure is if not.

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If not entirely respected, is at least, uh, respected to a considerable amount of time and is and is a right that feasibly could be respected.

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Well, the right that I think we need in this space is something like something like this.

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And I'll refer to as a sort of freedom to seek the truth by reasoning with other people.

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So it's a kind of complex, but I think fundamental, right?

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It embraces a freedom of thought component because as an individual, you need to be able to think freely and also a capacity to to reasons individual.

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But it also involves the freedom of communication that you communicate.

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You say things to people, they say things back to you and so on. But in addition, a kind of capacity to discuss things.

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So it's a it's an interpersonal, if you like, or social kind of phenomenon.

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So it's not simply you as an individual saying things. It's you as an individual thinking things and reasoning about what you're thinking about.

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But it's also individuals gathering together and communicating and discussing things.

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So there's a kind of deliberative dimension to it, a kind of collective deliberative dimension to it that's important.

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And moreover, if we're talking about political communication in the current environment, the most particularly mass society,

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albeit one with with these new with the Internet and with social media and these other enablers of public communication,

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it's to some extent both directly and inter.

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It nevertheless is some, to some extent, directly and indirectly exercised as as has been the case for some for hundreds of years via elected leaders.

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So I'm going to put this on the table, this notion of freely seeking the truth by reasoning with others.

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And I'm going to suggest that it's not so much an individual right as a joint. Right.

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It's a right that I have and you have, but you have and I have interdependent independently with one another.

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And it's a right that involves reasoning, not only formal, inductive and deductive reasoning, but informal reasoning.

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And of course, it's a right that is governed by epistemic and moral norms.

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Tell the truth, respect, evidence, and so on and so forth.

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So if you think about the sort of thing I have in mind, at least, and I'm not suggesting that this has been an ideal process in this case,

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the sort of thing I have in mind is the collective decision on the basis of reasoning with others.

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A lot of people got together and reasoned with their friends, but they also listened to what elected leaders and various other people had to say.

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There was, as it were, a collective political conversation which is ongoing in realise the Brexit.

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So that seems to me to be an example of the sort of phenomenon I've got in question.

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It's a lot of people thinking about an important matter.

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They've got different viewpoints, they're operating directly with one another,

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but they're also operating indirectly via, as it were thought leaders and political leaders and so on and so forth.

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So there's a kind of political conversation going on in relation to this issue.

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And at the end of that conversation, decisions are made via an election or potentially via another referendum or potentially

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simply via parliament or perhaps via the Prime Minister without the help of Parliament,

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depending on how things go. Now, I'm suggesting at all that that process has been an ideal one.

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What I'm suggesting choose. That's the kind of process I've got in mind.

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And it's kind of useful process to think about what has gone right and what has gone wrong in that process.

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You know, to what extent have people been telling the truth? To what extent has there been evidence?

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To what extent has there been manipulative outside influence and so on and so forth?

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So it's the it's the kind of process that even if it's even if in that instance,

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it's been extremely imperfect that comes under what I'm under the heading of freely seeking the truth by reasoning with other people.

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The truth in this case, of course,

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isn't so much a particular factual truth as opposed to a policy or course of action that is believed to be the best course of action for the country.

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Okay. So often when you make these sorts of points about, look, you know, we've got to think through the importance of reasoning,

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getting everyone to say, let's respect the truth, let's look at the evidence.

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You get a whole lot of people. They are, you know, the the the cynical and the the people who really know how it all works,

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the marketing experts and so on, saying, oh, well, you know, it's really all propaganda.

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And there isn't really a distinction between propaganda on the one hand and

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knowledge acquisition dissemination and serious rational deliberation on the other.

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It's it's just a sort of it's it's just all a kind of grand marketing exercise.

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And it's just some people are more powerful than others and so on and so forth.

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I think it's very important to maintain this distinction.

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And secondly, I think it's very important to realise that actually, far from there not being a distinction,

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the propagandists and the spurs of of fake news and so on are actually parasites that parasites on the fundamental,

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more fundamental process, which is actually bona fide a communication, try to respect the truth, try to look at the evidence and so on and so forth.

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And they're parasites in the in the, in the literal sense that a parasite wants to feed off the host,

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but it doesn't want the host to die because once the host dies, they can't extract anything from the host.

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And so what's actually going on with with propaganda and hate speech and also other stuff,

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if everyone was lying and everyone was simply manipulating everyone else and everyone realised this,

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then the whole the whole communicative enterprise would simply collapse.

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No one would bother communicating with anyone. No one you would be able to manipulate, manipulating because there were no other manipulative.

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And so so the the manipulators and the propagandists and the spread of the fake

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news are actually parrot are actually parasites in the sense they rely on,

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um, on others to actually comply with the epistemic and moral norms.

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Okay. So finally part D where we come to this subject, 5 minutes.

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This should be rather quick. It's the solution. Well, it's it's not really the solution, but it's some suggestions that I've done.

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I've done too much work to set up the difficulty, this problem solving, realising that now I don't have the answer.

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I should not give myself an easy task. Okay.

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So let's let's look at some of the possible things have been done in response to this.

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Well, one of the things I think can be done, which might sound rather silly and obvious,

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but is to address some of the legitimate grievances that are being exploited by the propagandists,

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if there is actually is a problem is a lot of people who are extremely poor or deprived or downtrodden might be an idea to do something about it,

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because then you would rob the propagandists of some of the firepower.

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Another thing that has to happen, of course, is that we have to enact justified laws and regulations, too,

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but we have to think hard about which things ought to be prohibited and and which ones ought not to be prohibited.

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And that's a complex process.

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Another kind of area, once we've got through that, this is obviously a schematic.

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I'm not going to do this for you in the time that I have,

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is that we need to look at issues around that are problematic in relation to enforcing laws and regulations.

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So obviously you're looking at removal of illegal propaganda, but there are a lot of sophisticated new methods that can undermine that.

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For example, the the Russians in this Cambridge Analytica case,

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some of these methods are not easy to counter, but a couple of things that you could be done.

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One is obviously to provide more adequate protection for personal information in

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the case of the Cambridge Analytica thing on the part of the Facebook and so on.

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But another thing that you can look at is actually looking at offensive, offensive cyber attacks on those nation states that want to be propagandist.

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This is a very real possibility and one that may need to be countenanced rather than just doing defensive measures,

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you might have to look at offensive measures of various kinds.

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One suggestion that a lot of people have made is a kind of counter propaganda would be one thing, of course,

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to have counter narratives that espousing liberal democratic values I don't have, but that's something that can be done.

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Counter propaganda, of course, is you now going for the business of spreading disinformation,

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telling few lies and so on in the manner that, for example, the UK did in the Second World War?

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This seems to me to be a really bad idea and it's something that of course the marketing people can tell us all.

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We can do this, we can use machine learning, we can battle this propaganda which will be counter propaganda, I think.

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This is very problematic, particularly for liberal democracies who are committed to evidence based,

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rational inquiry, open discussion to go in for propaganda in this in this way.

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Which is not to say that the intelligence agencies don't need to spread a bit of disinformation, as it were, secretly.

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But if you're talking about in the public space, I think this is highly problematic.

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And counter propaganda may actually just be ultimately counterproductive and devalue the liberal democratic currency.

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So I would recommend against that.

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Some of the things that you can do is work to restore or strengthen epistemic norms in the citizenry via various institutions,

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schools and universities, and try to maintain or strengthen the intellectual,

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moral health of epistemic institutions such as journalism and Parliament.

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I mean, one of the things that seems pretty obvious is that you if you want to if you want a strong, robust,

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resilient epistemic institution, say the media, a lot of and a lot of this is due to fellow countrymen.

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MURDOCH If you if you're in the business of undermining these norms within the journalistic and media companies themselves,

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00:46:22,670 --> 00:46:26,150
then obviously you're doing the work of of your adversary for you.

386
00:46:28,370 --> 00:46:29,120
And similarly,

387
00:46:29,120 --> 00:46:37,010
if you've got a parliament that is so obsessed with promoting the self-interest of individuals who are so obsessed with the interests of the party,

388
00:46:37,580 --> 00:46:47,420
of the political parties, that it can't actually get ahead with its deliberative work on behalf of the nations,

389
00:46:47,750 --> 00:46:51,230
which seems to be the case with the Republican Party in the US.

390
00:46:51,800 --> 00:46:59,720
And, and now, from what I can see from the outside is seems to be a feature of the Conservative Party at the moment.

391
00:47:00,140 --> 00:47:07,250
I mean, obviously this is very unhelpful because far from your epistemic institutions being a counterweight to these problems,

392
00:47:07,250 --> 00:47:16,879
they're sort of becoming part of the problem. Another kind of dimension to this is not to strengthen existing epistemic institutions,

393
00:47:16,880 --> 00:47:27,740
but to try to embed those epistemic institutions in the inside, as it were, in cyberspace.

394
00:47:28,460 --> 00:47:36,710
I mean, think of think of the say a quality newspaper with it will support investment journals

395
00:47:37,070 --> 00:47:44,420
that is using working and operating in the cyber realm as its material peers in,

396
00:47:44,750 --> 00:47:46,280
for example, in Facebook and so on.

397
00:47:48,230 --> 00:47:57,980
But it also can can do things to hold accountable those who are responsible for that, for fake news, hate speech and so on.

398
00:47:58,280 --> 00:48:06,890
So embedding in cyber in the cyber realm, these epistemic institutions is another thing that can be done.

399
00:48:07,160 --> 00:48:11,060
Let me finally then turn to social media platforms themselves.

400
00:48:11,960 --> 00:48:20,990
This brings me to the end of this is talk of the Internet and social media platforms.

401
00:48:21,410 --> 00:48:25,310
It has been claimed to render traditional epistemic institutions redundant.

402
00:48:26,180 --> 00:48:28,970
I think this has now been shown to be completely false.

403
00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:39,610
In fact, the reverse is the case that actually we need we need to strengthen and and extend the traditional epistemic institutions of universities,

404
00:48:40,940 --> 00:48:49,070
the free and independent press and so on. So it's proved to be a complete illusion that they've been rendered redundant.

405
00:48:51,280 --> 00:48:55,400
But secondly is quite clear that the tech companies themselves have failed to

406
00:48:55,640 --> 00:49:00,440
adequately self-regulate and ensure compliance with epistemic and moral norms.

407
00:49:00,860 --> 00:49:08,480
And so we need to to deal and partly because of the overriding commercial interests, various reasons for that.

408
00:49:08,780 --> 00:49:14,629
And so regulation is is strong.

409
00:49:14,630 --> 00:49:22,840
Regulation is required. There are a couple of different.

410
00:49:24,040 --> 00:49:30,580
Let me just come to come to the end of this, a couple of different general options here.

411
00:49:32,710 --> 00:49:37,570
One is if the joint check, if joint tech companies are to remain market based companies,

412
00:49:37,570 --> 00:49:41,530
then obviously they have to be made to comply with principles of free and fair competition.

413
00:49:41,950 --> 00:49:48,190
And that would require downsizing them, for example, reversing past acquisitions.

414
00:49:48,520 --> 00:49:57,460
In the case of Facebook, of Instagram and WhatsApp. On the other hand, if we come to The View, which I think we probably do need to come to,

415
00:49:58,180 --> 00:50:04,239
and the view that the tech companies themselves in a sense, espouse, that they're simply infrastructure providers.

416
00:50:04,240 --> 00:50:09,660
They're not actually the platforms, they're not actually publishers, they're just platforms for others, too.

417
00:50:09,940 --> 00:50:15,459
Then we need to ensure that that's exactly what they're doing. They're not actually facilitating particular publications.

418
00:50:15,460 --> 00:50:17,260
They're simply providing infrastructure.

419
00:50:17,650 --> 00:50:23,620
But the next thing that seems to follow is it may be that we just ought to be they ought to be transformed into public utilities,

420
00:50:24,820 --> 00:50:34,030
because public utilities will will perform that role much more satisfactorily, arguably, than the markets.

421
00:50:37,240 --> 00:50:40,690
Okay. You'll be pleased to know that this is the last slide.

422
00:50:44,680 --> 00:50:51,219
The certainly one of the things I don't think we can leave alone is the current

423
00:50:51,220 --> 00:50:57,430
situation where the tech the tech giants are not legally liable for material,

424
00:50:59,260 --> 00:51:07,660
for hate speech and so on that may appear on the platforms, but simultaneously,

425
00:51:07,870 --> 00:51:13,870
somehow they've taken responsibility or there's now co-responsibility for removing or regulating that.

426
00:51:14,180 --> 00:51:21,339
So I don't think you can have it both ways either, that they're responsible for regulating which case they're going to be held legally

427
00:51:21,340 --> 00:51:27,340
liable when they fail to regulate or they're out of the business of of of regulating.

428
00:51:27,340 --> 00:51:32,470
We don't have them making those decisions, but rather, say, an independent entity.

429
00:51:34,660 --> 00:51:38,230
So far, this is the final point I've been distinguishing.

430
00:51:38,620 --> 00:51:44,650
I've I've been talking largely in these last few minutes about regulation and,

431
00:51:45,070 --> 00:51:54,280
and the law in relation to to hate speech and, and fake news and propaganda.

432
00:51:54,640 --> 00:52:01,060
And of course, the law and regulation can do and is a necessary condition for doing this work.

433
00:52:01,270 --> 00:52:06,010
But I think the final point would be that actually is not going to be sufficient, as I pointed out earlier.

434
00:52:06,370 --> 00:52:20,890
And that means there has to be there has to be a strong counterweight from outside from from from, as it were,

435
00:52:21,430 --> 00:52:27,190
social forces, if you like, other than than the law and regulation and the enforcement of rule and regulation.

436
00:52:27,640 --> 00:52:37,450
And that that means, to some extent, I think, attitudes of ordinary people and them taking a responsibility for the citizenry.

437
00:52:37,450 --> 00:52:48,100
But it also means enhanced or or the return of professionalisation to a lot of the relevant occupations in this space.

438
00:52:48,640 --> 00:52:53,980
Uh, professionalisation being something that is to some extent subject to regulation,

439
00:52:53,980 --> 00:53:04,930
but is very much a matter of an occupational group or of an organisation taking a stand and developing

440
00:53:04,930 --> 00:53:14,770
a kind of culture that is oppositional to non-compliance to the epistemic and moral norms.

441
00:53:15,160 --> 00:53:16,510
Thank you. Thank you, Ruth.