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,
which I'm writing with a computer scientist by the name of Terry Bosso Meyer.
Terry, unfortunately, can't be here. He's the man who knows about all the technical details.
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.
But nevertheless, I have to take full responsibility for what I'm about to say.
Well, I did get some assistance from Terry for this particular presentation.
Okay. So I'll just quickly run through what I'm going to the structure of the presentation.
So, you know, roughly what's in store for you? It's in sort of four parts.
Depending on time, I may have to traverse some of these parts more quickly than might otherwise be desirable.
The first part is basically looking at what the nature of the problem in this area is,
because I think it's a kind of collection of sort of set of complex set of problems.
Secondly, I'm going to define the three key notions fake news, hate speech and proper and political propaganda.
It's political propaganda. That's my focus. And I take it that fake news and hate speech are typically components of political propaganda.
I won't spend too much time on these definitions since this is a sort of philosophical Chesnut point of area.
In Part C, the third part, I'll talk about how the right to freedom of communication is to be understood,
because I think the the dominant tradition in philosophy, at least in the analytic world, is derived from four mil.
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.
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.
We want to allow people to to express themselves and so on.
But on the other hand, we've got this problem because a lot of people are abusing that, right?
Giving us hate speech, giving us fake news and spouting propaganda.
And so we want to restrict that. But how do we how do we square the circle?
Okay. So I'll talk a little bit about the the notion of relevant notion of freedom of communication.
Then in Part D, I'm going to try and say think some things about how we could go about countering political proper
propaganda whilst in doing so respecting hopefully this right to freedom of communication,
but at least having some impact on reducing the amount of fake news, hate speech and and political propaganda.
And a particular thing to keep in mind here is if you see that on the board
there under D one is the role of what I refer to as epistemic institutions.
This is sort of the philosophical terms of the notion of epistemic, but it's basically just means institutions concerned with knowledge.
So if one thinks of schools, universities, but also the press, for example,
that concern to investigate matters, to figure out what's actually going on out there, but also, of course,
parliaments and committee, parliamentary committees,
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.
But they should be, as it were, deliberative bodies and therefore to that extent epistemic in my sense.
So it's a fairly broad ranging notion of the epistemic that I have in mind.
Right. So Part II is sort of unpacking the problem.
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,
Facebook, Twitter, etc. and they're now used by literally billions of communicators world wide as I related tech developments such in the.
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,
been remarkable in terms of the unprecedented flows of information, the capacity to to find out things,
but also in terms of the capacity of people to exercise their right to communicate with one another.
What is of particular interest to me is the right to to communicate,
not simply with anyone on the Internet or with your friends on Facebook or something.
What I'm interested in is because I'm interested in political propaganda.
I'm interested in the moral right to public communication.
Public communication. And by public communication, I don't just mean as a way your private communications, your friends.
There are two features of public communication I would draw attention to.
The notion is rather more complex than than this. But there are two features that I think are worth drawing attention to.
First of all, the message communicated becomes a message that goes to and is intended to go to a large number of people.
But each of those each of those persons who is communicated to knows that a whole lot of other people have been communicated to.
So it's not just that you've been communicated with, but that you've grasped this message in someone else's grasp, especially.
So it's that we all know that we've all grasped this message.
So there's a there's that dimension to it, which is sometimes referred to as in the literature is common knowledge,
which is I know that something you know, that something, I know that you know that something's wrong and so forth.
The other feature of this, what I'm calling public communication,
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,
in the sense that in principle you got access that is, you know,
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.
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,
that's that's, as I say, visible, highly, pretty highly visible.
So we're all kind of aware of it. It's not just a question of the capacity to access it.
Okay. Unfortunately, in addition to this, in increasing our capacity to to come to know things and to communicate,
there's also been an exponential increase in the topic of this talk, namely hate speech, fake news and political propaganda.
And as and relatedly, there's been an attempt, considerable empowerment of extremist political groups,
bearing in mind I'm interested in political propaganda,
notably groups like Islamic State and so on, and also the capacity it has enabled various political actors to intervene in democratic processes.
And one thinks here of Cambridge, at Cambridge I think also the interventions in relation to Brexit,
but more recently in the European elections on these these the capacity to intervene has been facilitated by not only by the Internet obviously,
but by social media and by some of these AI techniques of machine learning, for example.
And if you think of particular example of hate speech,
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,
in Myanmar, which evidently led to or was facilitated the murder of many of those individuals.
Okay. So. If we come back to this notion of public communication and the kind of sphere of public communication,
and I suppose the paradigm that people sometimes have in mind,
or at least people who've studied the history of Western civilisation,
the history of Western philosophy or whatever they think of Athens and the forum.
And, you know, there's a relatively small number of people who are citizens.
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
they could talk to one another and everyone had a chance to speak and so on.
And so you had this kind of this notion of public communication, such that everyone could speak, as it were,
at least in in in theory, if not in practice, to pretty much everyone else they could publicly communicate was a public space.
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.
So if you take the U.K., the kind of public sphere created to some extent by organisations like the BBC,
where most people in the U.K. aware of certain developments they get everyone gets the same,
roughly speaking, the same news and so on, and knows what's going on.
That has been or at least that was formerly the case to a considerable extent.
That's been undermined to some extent by these new developments.
So there's been a kind of splitting or fragmentation of this public sphere,
and you've got a whole range of different audiences that are focussed on other members of their narrow
audience and don't necessarily get the same news or in the same things as members of some other audience.
So you've got a development, or at least the the the considerable increase in so-called narrowcasting versus broadcast communications.
And to some extent, if we look at the international sphere in the world as it's come to be with globalisation,
it's clear that there are a whole range of common problems that we all, as sort of member of the human race,
need to know something about and one thinks of climate change and so on.
So one would one would have thought we would want a kind of, as it were,
a sort of global public sphere of communication to so that we can think about
and be informed about these problems that we confront collectively as humans.
But unfortunately, there's been a kind of a kind of Balkanisation, if you like, in relation to the public.
That's where the global public sphere, partly because we've got some nation states such as,
say, China and Russia, who want to slow down or censor certain sorts of information.
They don't want Chinese people to have access, for example, to websites outside China.
The Russians, again, are looking at doing things in this space.
So there's a kind of fragmentation Balkanisation going on in terms of where the international public sphere.
And so the upshot of this is that perhaps somewhat paradoxically,
the important development that seems to have arisen as a consequence of social media,
the Internet and so on, is that the pre-existing public spheres of communication have been to some extent, sort of splintered and fragmented.
And the what one might have expected, namely the development of out of a global sphere of public communication,
has been much less than one might have thought, and certainly less than what one might think would be desirable.
Okay. Now, aside from this notion of a public sphere of communication and the idea of people having rights to communicate to
the public as opposed to simply being able to communicate with their friends or in an interpersonal communication,
these this the maintenance of of public communication,
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,
is it will need to be communication which is compliant with various epistemic and moral norms.
In other words, that is regularities in behaviour that people are committed to.
So for example, if you take a simple. Out of the norm of aiming at the truth, of trying to tell the truth.
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,
I'm not going to bother telling the truth, and you said decided you weren't going to bother telling the truth.
Communication would quickly start to break down because I wouldn't I wouldn't trust you to tell the truth.
You wouldn't trust me to tell the truth. And so these norms are obviously of great importance.
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.
You don't go around trashing people, saying false things about them.
And of course, there are laws about body of law development in relation to this.
But in the case of the sort of unregulated or relatively unregulated Internet,
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.
Another kind of norm is in relation to the distinction between factual or truth aiming or communication,
which is concerned with how things are as opposed to mere entertainment.
And we think that's an important distinction that we want to hold onto.
And when someone says something, we want to know, well,
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,
silly, entertaining claim?
And that distinction between truth on the one hand and entertainment on the other seems to have been coming under increasing pressure.
It was coming under pressure before with phenomena like infotainment that it's becoming it's coming under greater pressure.
Okay. So it's very important that we attend to these epistemic and moral norms of communication.
And the the lack of compliance with them is very problematic in terms of the quality of of public communication.
There are two general ways in which we try to ensure compliance with these norms.
One way is to have laws and enforceable laws and regulations for the most serious breaches.
Laws against defamation, laws against incitement to violence and so on.
But those laws and regulations in and of themselves are not going to be sufficient.
We also need people to have collectively attitudes that of respect for those norms.
They know what the norms are,
and I think they're important and they will express disapproval and pull people up if and when they breach those those norms.
And of course, if you've got the the the greater the amount of non-compliance, the weaker those norms become.
If you get enough people disobeying the laws, enough people just give up on telling the truth.
Oh, well, you know, you've got to tell the truth. I'm going to tell the truth. No, it doesn't really matter.
And so on. Then the norm starts to be undermined.
And of course, if you have state actors deliberately such as, say, Russia,
in relation to various matters, or to take a look at an example near to home, if you've got, say,
the American president who's quite happy to tell lies and put about say false things about people willy nilly,
then this is very unhelpful in terms of maintenance of these these norms, these epistemic and moral norms.
Okay. So we're coming to the end of this section.
I said earlier that I thought there wasn't just a simple problem of freedom of communication versus banning or prohibiting hate speech,
fake news and propaganda.
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.
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,
for example. But isn't it essentially fake news?
What is the difference between propaganda and political claims that may be motivated by by political interests?
But nevertheless, we might want to say they're not actually propaganda.
So there's a range of questions in that space.
Another kind of question is that we've touched on is what is the nature and extent of the moral right of freedom,
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.
This is a kind of ethical principle.
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?
So are we going to help ourselves to principle, necessity, proportionality, Facebook,
for example, when it decides that it wants it thinks that certain material should be taken down,
helps itself to community standards and of course, censors people who censor communications have always helped themselves to community standards.
But the question then arises with what are the what are the community standards?
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?
Another kind of set of set of questions, concerns what ought to who ought to decide these questions?
So it's one thing to say we've decided what the definition of fake news we decided we want to make it illegal.
But then there's the question as to who gets to decide what is or isn't fake news at the moment.
For example, some of the big tech companies themselves, Facebook, are making a lot of those decisions.
Is this is this the way we should be going?
Are they the right the right institutional actors to be making those sorts of decisions?
And then finally, there's a whole range of questions to do with how how are we going to respond to this?
How are we going to combat this? Presumably, we want to reduce hate speech.
We want to reduce fake news and political propaganda, but what are we going to do to reduce it?
And the critical question there is what are we going to do?
What policies we want to put in place? What regulations have we got to introduce consistent with liberal democratic principles?
Because it may be that we can we can reduce a lot of these things, but in so doing,
undermine principles we take to be constitutive of liberal democracy.
I guess in Part B, I might skim through part B reasonably quickly.
It's a sort of a lot of definitions. So fake news, of course, is news.
It's so it's not simply things that are false.
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.
It is false. And it's news that is not believed by the originator.
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,
then I suggest that it's that is a condition for being fake news.
But the key condition I would draw your attention to is that fake news purports to be true.
That is, it presents itself as being true. And that's quite, quite an important defining condition, I suggest, of fake news.
Fake news is, of course, problematic, since a lot of it's false.
All of it's false, but it's likely to be believed by many people that's going to be a problem.
And it has a lot of potentially bad political consequences, some of which I mentioned earlier.
What about political hate speech? Well, political hate speech has been actually quite a difficult concept to define.
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.
I would suggest to you that it's it's it's speech that is intended to incite
hatred against some group and that it has a reasonable chance of inciting hatred,
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.
But a critical component of hate speech, as I understand it, is that the truth of what said in the hate speech?
In the hate speech, even if even if it does have some truthful content, that it's not the truth.
It's of interest to the to the speaker of hate speech. The the the interest is in is inciting interest, inciting hatred.
So that's the that's the motive. Okay.
And again, it's obviously problematic.
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.
It also has some other characteristics. For example, it's likely to generate conflict and it undermines an important liberal democratic value,
namely fraternity, which people often don't think about.
These days I think of freedom. I think of equality. But fraternity, the sense in which a political community has to work together,
respect one another in relation to moving forward to pursue policies for the common good is obviously very unhelpful in relation to that.
And of course, fake news, hate speech and cyber space have been particularly harmful given the community reach of the Internet,
the communicative reach of the Internet and the power of these social media platforms.
Okay. What about political propaganda? Well, political propaganda is, I suggest, public communication in the service of a political ideology.
What is political ideology? I think here it's important to hold on to a distinction between political ideology and systems of political ideas.
The two things are often collapsed and people start talking about a political set of political ideas as ideology.
I think it's important to resist that.
Like political ideas, ideology is a structured set of beliefs and assumptions, and it serves like political ideas for political purposes.
But I think the critical difference is that ideology only exists because it serves political a political purpose, and not because, as it were,
the world of reality, the social, economic, legal, whatever reality is, as the ideology says, research, not ideology, is not motivated by truth.
It's motivated purely by political purpose.
And of course, in the current environment, in the cyber world,
political ideology has been able to rely on the power of the Internet and social media in harness with a lot of psychologically based,
manipulative marketing techniques to great effect, as, for example, is evident in the Cambridge Analytica scandal mentioned earlier.
Okay, so part C would go through this reasonably quickly as well to get to Part D.
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,
there's so many people. It's something of an illusion to think that everyone can communicate with everyone else.
There's just too many people.
So what's historically happened is that there's a kind of people's communication with with one another is mediated by various institutions,
including notably the press, print and TV and so on.
Now, with the advent of social media and the Internet, there's now this capacity to engage in direct public communication with everyone as,
for example, TRUMP But there are a lot of other ordinary people do.
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,
of the Athenian sort of forum, where we were all sitting around and we can all talk to one another because in principle,
any of us can reach anyone else directly. Well, I think this is an illusion because just far too many people.
And so in actual fact, if you if you take, for example, Trump's got apparently 3 million or so members of his audience.
He can regularly and does regularly communicate with all 3 million.
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.
But the three not every one of that 3 million can possibly communicate to all the other 3 million.
So it's something of an illusion to think that we've as we're overcome through these for social media and the Internet,
that fundamental problem that confronts mass societies, although it has certainly extended the capacity to communicate,
including to directly communicate for some minority here,
we I think we need to distinguish between the right to communicate and the right to be a follower of communications.
Everyone can be a right can receive the communications of Trump, but few can actually be to communicate all.
Okay. So what is this right to public communication?
What is it actually being reduced to in in the contemporary setting?
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.
It's a right that you have to communicate to the public at large. And so we think it's a right everyone has.
I suggest that that right and I'm talking now about public political communication has in effect, been reduced to the following.
It's not so much a right as an opportunity to compete with others for a public audience.
So you don't have a right to communicate, communicate everyone.
You do have an opportunity to compete with a whole lot of other people for a large audience.
But unfortunately, when you compete with others to communicate with a large audience,
you do so under conditions of unfair competition because you don't have the resources,
the wherewithal that a lot of organisations or people that are backed by organisations
have to collect all of the data to use machine learning techniques and so on,
and so to refine your message and and so on and so forth. So it's targeted to certain people.
And so, so unfortunately for you and for me, you're competing under conditions of unfair competition.
A third point, which I've already touched on, is that unfortunately, the norms governing this communication, a frequently flouted,
they are frequently not complied with, and the space of public communication is much less regulated both in terms of laws and regulations,
but also in terms of ordinary social attitudes than was the case before and in exercising or trying to exercise your your
opportunity to compete with other audiences in conditions of unfair competition in which norms governing communication flouted.
This whole process is facilitated by the social media platforms on which which you use to make your communications.
And those platforms are far from being, as it were,
entirely neutral platforms that are only interested in making sure that everyone
has a fair shot at communicating whatever it is that they want to communicate,
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.
So the idea isn't that they're going to going to adjudicate matters,
adjudicate things in the manner in which the most important political information or the most
truthful or the most accurate political information is gained by the greatest number of people.
Rather, what they're interested in is ensuring that the kind of material that's pumped around maximises the cash flow.
So that isn't very helpful either in terms of the quality and the the compliance with with moral and epistemic norms.
Okay. So if that's the general situation, the specific problem, let me remind you again, is on the one hand,
we've got political matter to fake news, hate speech and so on, which is exploding exponentially, is a sort of exponentially developed.
So there's a huge amount of it out there.
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.
So what I want to do now is, is take a little bit of a step back from this right to formally communicate.
So the first thing, when people think about their right to communicate, they think of an individual right to communicate.
That I have to you and you have to me.
And so I've suggested that that's not quite right, that what you've actually got, if you're talking about public communication,
is a right because you can't actually communicate with everyone and everyone can't actually communicate with you.
It's more like you've got a right to if you've got a right to say there opportunity
to compete with others to get your communication to a larger audience.
So what is the but what is the sort of fundamental right that we're interested here in,
in protecting what what's the important right that we want to make sure is if not.
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.
Well, the right that I think we need in this space is something like something like this.
And I'll refer to as a sort of freedom to seek the truth by reasoning with other people.
So it's a kind of complex, but I think fundamental, right?
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.
But it also involves the freedom of communication that you communicate.
You say things to people, they say things back to you and so on. But in addition, a kind of capacity to discuss things.
So it's a it's an interpersonal, if you like, or social kind of phenomenon.
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.
But it's also individuals gathering together and communicating and discussing things.
So there's a kind of deliberative dimension to it, a kind of collective deliberative dimension to it that's important.
And moreover, if we're talking about political communication in the current environment, the most particularly mass society,
albeit one with with these new with the Internet and with social media and these other enablers of public communication,
it's to some extent both directly and inter.
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.
So I'm going to put this on the table, this notion of freely seeking the truth by reasoning with others.
And I'm going to suggest that it's not so much an individual right as a joint. Right.
It's a right that I have and you have, but you have and I have interdependent independently with one another.
And it's a right that involves reasoning, not only formal, inductive and deductive reasoning, but informal reasoning.
And of course, it's a right that is governed by epistemic and moral norms.
Tell the truth, respect, evidence, and so on and so forth.
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,
the sort of thing I have in mind is the collective decision on the basis of reasoning with others.
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.
There was, as it were, a collective political conversation which is ongoing in realise the Brexit.
So that seems to me to be an example of the sort of phenomenon I've got in question.
It's a lot of people thinking about an important matter.
They've got different viewpoints, they're operating directly with one another,
but they're also operating indirectly via, as it were thought leaders and political leaders and so on and so forth.
So there's a kind of political conversation going on in relation to this issue.
And at the end of that conversation, decisions are made via an election or potentially via another referendum or potentially
simply via parliament or perhaps via the Prime Minister without the help of Parliament,
depending on how things go. Now, I'm suggesting at all that that process has been an ideal one.
What I'm suggesting choose. That's the kind of process I've got in mind.
And it's kind of useful process to think about what has gone right and what has gone wrong in that process.
You know, to what extent have people been telling the truth? To what extent has there been evidence?
To what extent has there been manipulative outside influence and so on and so forth?
So it's the it's the kind of process that even if it's even if in that instance,
it's been extremely imperfect that comes under what I'm under the heading of freely seeking the truth by reasoning with other people.
The truth in this case, of course,
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.
Okay. So often when you make these sorts of points about, look, you know, we've got to think through the importance of reasoning,
getting everyone to say, let's respect the truth, let's look at the evidence.
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,
the marketing experts and so on, saying, oh, well, you know, it's really all propaganda.
And there isn't really a distinction between propaganda on the one hand and
knowledge acquisition dissemination and serious rational deliberation on the other.
It's it's just a sort of it's it's just all a kind of grand marketing exercise.
And it's just some people are more powerful than others and so on and so forth.
I think it's very important to maintain this distinction.
And secondly, I think it's very important to realise that actually, far from there not being a distinction,
the propagandists and the spurs of of fake news and so on are actually parasites that parasites on the fundamental,
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.
And they're parasites in the in the, in the literal sense that a parasite wants to feed off the host,
but it doesn't want the host to die because once the host dies, they can't extract anything from the host.
And so what's actually going on with with propaganda and hate speech and also other stuff,
if everyone was lying and everyone was simply manipulating everyone else and everyone realised this,
then the whole the whole communicative enterprise would simply collapse.
No one would bother communicating with anyone. No one you would be able to manipulate, manipulating because there were no other manipulative.
And so so the the manipulators and the propagandists and the spread of the fake
news are actually parrot are actually parasites in the sense they rely on,
um, on others to actually comply with the epistemic and moral norms.
Okay. So finally part D where we come to this subject, 5 minutes.
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.
I've done too much work to set up the difficulty, this problem solving, realising that now I don't have the answer.
I should not give myself an easy task. Okay.
So let's let's look at some of the possible things have been done in response to this.
Well, one of the things I think can be done, which might sound rather silly and obvious,
but is to address some of the legitimate grievances that are being exploited by the propagandists,
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,
because then you would rob the propagandists of some of the firepower.
Another thing that has to happen, of course, is that we have to enact justified laws and regulations, too,
but we have to think hard about which things ought to be prohibited and and which ones ought not to be prohibited.
And that's a complex process.
Another kind of area, once we've got through that, this is obviously a schematic.
I'm not going to do this for you in the time that I have,
is that we need to look at issues around that are problematic in relation to enforcing laws and regulations.
So obviously you're looking at removal of illegal propaganda, but there are a lot of sophisticated new methods that can undermine that.
For example, the the Russians in this Cambridge Analytica case,
some of these methods are not easy to counter, but a couple of things that you could be done.
One is obviously to provide more adequate protection for personal information in
the case of the Cambridge Analytica thing on the part of the Facebook and so on.
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.
This is a very real possibility and one that may need to be countenanced rather than just doing defensive measures,
you might have to look at offensive measures of various kinds.
One suggestion that a lot of people have made is a kind of counter propaganda would be one thing, of course,
to have counter narratives that espousing liberal democratic values I don't have, but that's something that can be done.
Counter propaganda, of course, is you now going for the business of spreading disinformation,
telling few lies and so on in the manner that, for example, the UK did in the Second World War?
This seems to me to be a really bad idea and it's something that of course the marketing people can tell us all.
We can do this, we can use machine learning, we can battle this propaganda which will be counter propaganda, I think.
This is very problematic, particularly for liberal democracies who are committed to evidence based,
rational inquiry, open discussion to go in for propaganda in this in this way.
Which is not to say that the intelligence agencies don't need to spread a bit of disinformation, as it were, secretly.
But if you're talking about in the public space, I think this is highly problematic.
And counter propaganda may actually just be ultimately counterproductive and devalue the liberal democratic currency.
So I would recommend against that.
Some of the things that you can do is work to restore or strengthen epistemic norms in the citizenry via various institutions,
schools and universities, and try to maintain or strengthen the intellectual,
moral health of epistemic institutions such as journalism and Parliament.
I mean, one of the things that seems pretty obvious is that you if you want to if you want a strong, robust,
resilient epistemic institution, say the media, a lot of and a lot of this is due to fellow countrymen.
MURDOCH If you if you're in the business of undermining these norms within the journalistic and media companies themselves,
then obviously you're doing the work of of your adversary for you.
And similarly,
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,
of the political parties, that it can't actually get ahead with its deliberative work on behalf of the nations,
which seems to be the case with the Republican Party in the US.
And, and now, from what I can see from the outside is seems to be a feature of the Conservative Party at the moment.
I mean, obviously this is very unhelpful because far from your epistemic institutions being a counterweight to these problems,
they're sort of becoming part of the problem. Another kind of dimension to this is not to strengthen existing epistemic institutions,
but to try to embed those epistemic institutions in the inside, as it were, in cyberspace.
I mean, think of think of the say a quality newspaper with it will support investment journals
that is using working and operating in the cyber realm as its material peers in,
for example, in Facebook and so on.
But it also can can do things to hold accountable those who are responsible for that, for fake news, hate speech and so on.
So embedding in cyber in the cyber realm, these epistemic institutions is another thing that can be done.
Let me finally then turn to social media platforms themselves.
This brings me to the end of this is talk of the Internet and social media platforms.
It has been claimed to render traditional epistemic institutions redundant.
I think this has now been shown to be completely false.
In fact, the reverse is the case that actually we need we need to strengthen and and extend the traditional epistemic institutions of universities,
the free and independent press and so on. So it's proved to be a complete illusion that they've been rendered redundant.
But secondly is quite clear that the tech companies themselves have failed to
adequately self-regulate and ensure compliance with epistemic and moral norms.
And so we need to to deal and partly because of the overriding commercial interests, various reasons for that.
And so regulation is is strong.
Regulation is required. There are a couple of different.
Let me just come to come to the end of this, a couple of different general options here.
One is if the joint check, if joint tech companies are to remain market based companies,
then obviously they have to be made to comply with principles of free and fair competition.
And that would require downsizing them, for example, reversing past acquisitions.
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,
and the view that the tech companies themselves in a sense, espouse, that they're simply infrastructure providers.
They're not actually the platforms, they're not actually publishers, they're just platforms for others, too.
Then we need to ensure that that's exactly what they're doing. They're not actually facilitating particular publications.
They're simply providing infrastructure.
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,
because public utilities will will perform that role much more satisfactorily, arguably, than the markets.
Okay. You'll be pleased to know that this is the last slide.
The certainly one of the things I don't think we can leave alone is the current
situation where the tech the tech giants are not legally liable for material,
for hate speech and so on that may appear on the platforms, but simultaneously,
somehow they've taken responsibility or there's now co-responsibility for removing or regulating that.
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
liable when they fail to regulate or they're out of the business of of of regulating.
We don't have them making those decisions, but rather, say, an independent entity.
So far, this is the final point I've been distinguishing.
I've I've been talking largely in these last few minutes about regulation and,
and the law in relation to to hate speech and, and fake news and propaganda.
And of course, the law and regulation can do and is a necessary condition for doing this work.
But I think the final point would be that actually is not going to be sufficient, as I pointed out earlier.
And that means there has to be there has to be a strong counterweight from outside from from from, as it were,
social forces, if you like, other than than the law and regulation and the enforcement of rule and regulation.
And that that means, to some extent, I think, attitudes of ordinary people and them taking a responsibility for the citizenry.
But it also means enhanced or or the return of professionalisation to a lot of the relevant occupations in this space.
Uh, professionalisation being something that is to some extent subject to regulation,
but is very much a matter of an occupational group or of an organisation taking a stand and developing
a kind of culture that is oppositional to non-compliance to the epistemic and moral norms.
Thank you. Thank you, Ruth.