Fake news: It is an ever-present concern in digital spaces to fight disinformation. However, it does not support encouraging the pursuit of truth and tends to forget placing the human person at the centre of the development of both technology and the norm. The pursuit of truth is a drive that has compelled human beings since ancient times to search for further knowledge. It forms the foundation of epistemology as well as of the entire philosophy of science. In Platonic cave myth, it is skepticism about the reality provided by the shadowy projections that propels the will of the philosopher toward the finding of reality and the sharing of its fruits.
Does the allegory then apply in a cave that has become ordered and vast, like the cyber world and the Internet? Indeed, it is echoed in the phrase, ‘Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is curiosity in the Hacker Manifesto. Or perhaps the problem is the Splinternet, i.e. the tendency for Internet fragmentation by culture and regulation, which is shaping the comforting caverns of echo chambers?
Interconnected but fragmented: the echo chamber knot
The possibility of being interconnected through the Internet is a fact and a hypothesis that can generate a range of circumstances, from information exchange and creation to polarisations and extremes. The social network is the space where precisely the phenomenon of echo chambers or echo chambers has been recorded, i.e. virtual environments (traditionally: groups or “social bubbles”) where the access and flow of simple information in agreement with the convictions of the user are facilitated, while any deviating information is simply excluded, downplayed and, in fact, censored.
By virtue of the outcome of presenting and confirming one representation of reality, rejecting all others in a completely uncritical manner. In a certain way, it is the development of digital ecologies that has been responsible for this fractioning, driven by algorithms and engagement reward mechanisms that increasingly create genuine gamification. With extremely strong information asymmetries in effect, these kinds of systems are being taken up extensively by users and, therefore, now need to be embraced as a reality. Not fixed, necessarily, but having become immensely complex over time.
But the legislator has instead focused more on the phenomenon downstream of content creation and sharing, promoting initiatives and campaigns to “fight disinformation”. Most likely because of the emotional current of a state of emergency and reflex action. However, this entails a level of shortsightedness in the approach, which prevents adequate analysis and understanding of the phenomenon. If one does not consider its presuppositions, designing interventions that have the goal of employing (or triggering) corrective actions upstream is, before it is impossible, unthinkable.
The regulatory solution to the phenomenon of fake news
The main fixation on the agendas of various governments was never the search for truth – or better, removing obstacles and a route to it – but fighting against “disinformation”. Whatever that is, the quietly accepted meaning of fake news involves not merely outrightly manufactured news but false news disguised in a form so that it appeals to the reader’s conception of fact. This also takes place not against the truth but through rhetorical techniques or other methods that appeal to the reader’s interest. Experience indicates further that such fake news shares the motive of advancing socio-cultural, scientific, economic or political interests, say, for instance, i.e. advancing a divergent purpose from the sheer search for an exchange of truth or knowledge.
Both manipulation of the reader and divergence in relation to the purity of the purposes are signifiers that can be read so universally that they can be used to impose arbitrary assumptions to legitimise any contrasting action. In operation, this most frequently means the elimination of information and criminalisation of its original or mediated author. The European Union, in its description of how it will fight disinformation through codes of conduct, employs the rhetorical tactic of the slippery slope: the spread of fake news is a “growing threat to European democracies” with a destabilising effect.
But if a democracy may be undermined by fake news activities, then it should well have invested in educating citizens in the pursuit of truth, and not in the more varied activities – whose value remains untested – of fighting disinformation. At the very least, both objectives could be achieved, since one does not exclude the other. Can we assert that the compromise of thinking that democracy becomes inherently compromised because of the “digital” has been, if not accepted by the masses, narrated so that it has been regarded as an acceptable truth? It is a fallacy to assume that there can be a just and absolute standard to counteract fake news. In believing that any standard in this respect can be detrimental and lead to the abolition of the phenomenon, one hallucinates.
The ineffectiveness of regulatory action in confronting false news
If attempted as the exclusive solution, any regulatory move to fight against fake news is doomed to fail due to the size of the “playing field” and the generation and dissemination velocity of such news. It indeed encompasses more serious issues than it is intended to solve, which are in numbers of a few orders of magnitude lower than are resolved. Let us take, for example, an extension to the maximum punishment ability in the abstract and the choice to target the act of anyone who spreads false news.
This has the effect of placing all those who have fallen under the distorting influence in competition with the offenders, in effect taking the risk of criminalizing some victims. Is it an intolerable clandestine obligation on the user’s part to verify each piece of content before re-sharing it? What is the minimum level of knowledge and perception that must be achieved so that the conduct will be unacceptable under law as predictable in its illegality and therefore a source of liability? The re-publishing of an obviously false or unsubstantiated piece of news with the overt intention of enlarging its coverage and negative effects is technically a school case.
While the imposition of an over-broad rule risks infringing on freedom of expression and information, e.g., the production of satirical or critical pieces. As widespread as the dissemination of Artificial Intelligence has become, with news being easy to fake in this era, are we sure that an emphasis on criminalizing illegal use of one of these tools will turn out to be a successful strategy? So the proclaimed and admirable aim to create a “better” cyber world (another highly dangerous expression because it’s relative) ends up, in fact, creating ways leading to firmly unfavourable futures. Above all, since they failed to eliminate the evil, they set out to solve it. This is not only because of the natural randomness of technological development but also because the central role of the user is not adequately considered.
Placing the human at the center
The moment the human individual is a mere formal recipient and passive object, then elementary rights and freedoms will be nothing more than a piece of paper. Or a few bytes. For this is the same if one opts for the fight against disinformation rather than opting for the quest for the truth on the side of the fellow human being, and not this being confined to the activity area as a social network user. The liberty of this discovery must, however, be protected against every interference, but it requires human beings, even in the digital multiverse, to be able to resist and act. These are basic points to be taken into consideration so that citizens and legislators can go through the albeit complex technological and regulatory advancement.
