"Whenever I hear the term 'misinformation', I can't help thinking of the conversation between Captain Renault and Humphrey Bogart's Rick in Casablanca. Captain Renault (played by Claude Rains) asks Rick:
"What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?"
Rick:"My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters."
Renault:"The waters! What waters? We're in the desert..."
Rick:"I was misinformed..."
Now we can take it that Rick is not telling the truth. He didn't go to Casablanca for the waters. So is he now attempting to misinform Captain Renault? But Renault finds his reason incredible. 'There are no waters, we're in a desert!'
What's interesting here, however, is that Casablanca isn't in the desert. It's on the coast; it has a Mediterranean climate. You'd have to travel inland about 500 km to get to the Sahara. So there's a whole lot of misinformation going on here.
The thing about misinformation is that there is a lot of misinformation about... misinformation. Sometimes what is called misinformation is really disinformation. And don't get me started on 'malinformation'.
Thus it is easy to start talking about misinformation, and its dangers, only to discover that you've been misinforming your audience. For on some accounts, misinformation is merely misfortunate, rather than malicious. Misinformation may merely mean I'm mistaken; my misleading you was my mistake.
Let's look at some definitions, and try to disentangle mis- and dis-information. Now one frequent way to separate misinformation and disinformation is to say that misinformation is unknowingly false, whereas disinformation is deceitfully so. The UN's 2021 Special Rapporteur's Report on Disinformation and Freedom of Expression takes this approach: 'disinformation is understood as false information that is disseminated intentionally to cause serious social harm, and misinformation as the dissemination of false information unknowingly. The terms are not used interchangeably.'
That's reasonably clear-and it is important to be clear on this: as the UN Report also points out, when misinformation and disinformation are mixed up, or used interchangeably, it can lead to approaches to the issue that endanger freedom of expression.
So let's turn now to see what our own Electoral Commission does about this. Disinformation and misinformation are defined in legislation, in the Electoral Reform Act, like so:
''misinformation', for the purposes of this Act, means any false or misleading online electoral process information that may cause public harm, whether or not the information was created or disseminated with knowledge of its falsity or misleading nature or with any intention to cause such harm'.
By 'harm' here is meant 'public harm', that is, 'any serious threat to the fairness or integrity of an election or referendum'.
So 'misinformation' may be deliberate lying; but it may also be a mistake or an error. As for disinformation, 'for the purposes of this Act, [it] means any false or misleading online electoral information that- (a) may cause public harm, and (b) by reason of the nature and character of its content, context or any other relevant circumstance gives rise to the inference that it was created or disseminated in order to deceive'.
It seems then, according to Irish law, that all disinformation is misinformation; but not all misinformation is disinformation. Misinformation is the genus; of which disinformation is a species. The UN Special Rapporteur's concern about clarity in terminology, and avoiding interchangeability, is here apparently ignored. Could it be that our Electoral Commission is not quite as concerned about free speech as the UN?
There is, indeed, nothing in the Electoral Act, or in the statements of the members of the Electoral Commission, that might indicate a respect for freedom of expression. Consider the remarks from Justice Marie Baker, speaking at the launch of the 𝕏 Commission:
'We have powers to require the correction or removal of information we believe to be incorrect, and they are very extensive powers not found in fact in that many other European countries... we're also going to have to deal with the balance between the right of freedom of expression on the one hand and on the other hand, the right of persons not to be misinformed...'
What on earth is the right of persons not to be 𝕏 misinformed? A right not to be the recipient of mistaken information? Or a right not to be deceived? I'm still trying to work out if my right not to be misinformed was just breached by Justice Baker's claim that I have right not to be 𝕏 misinformed.
Whatever its provenance, Baker speaks of 'balancing' the right to freedom of expression against this mysterious 'right'. The UN's Special Rapporteur, by contrast, speaks of the right to free speech as being of such fundamental importance to the enjoyment of all other human rights that any restrictions must be 'exceptional and narrowly construed'. The prohibition of false information, the UN Report continues, 'is not in itself a legitimate aim under international human rights law'.
Even on the point of election integrity, the UN Report again emphasises the importance-to democracy-of free speech; any restrictions 'must be narrowly construed, time-limited, and tailored so as to avoid limiting political debate'. None of these safeguards are evident in the Electoral Act.
'We're all going to have to become philosophers in a sense,' Baker went on to add at one point in the press conference, 'we're all going to have to learn how to test truth'. And it follows, presumably, censor what fails the test. But free speech is not about saying what one thinks is true; one has a right too to say what is false-and to say what is false deliberately.
This is because, as the UN Report emphasises, the right to freedom of expression applies to all kinds of information and ideas, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of the content. People have the right to express ill-founded opinions, or indulge in parody or satire. But it may seem as if our Electoral Commission has granted itself the powers to remove such expression, if it were considered as having the potential to cause public harm. Justice Baker was quite proud of the 'extensive powers' to remove or correct misinformation; powers, as she says, not found in many European countries. Others might find this chilling.
An agency commissioned to pursue mis- and disinformation will struggle to avoid the temptation to remove or edit political opinions; this, and not the correction of misstatements, intentional or otherwise, of facts, will end up being its purpose. The threat to public harm from an online post with no power but persuasion, versus a statutory body equipped with powers to remove online content, is not comparable.
If the Electoral Commission is really keen to deal with mis- and disinformation, then instead of boasting about its powers to censor, it could champion the human right to freedom of expression. The UN Report points out that disinformation 'tends to thrive where human rights are constrained, where the public information regime is not robust, and where media quality, diversity and independence is weak.' On the other hand, 'where freedom of opinion and expression is protected, civil society, journalists and others are able to challenge falsehoods and present alternative viewpoints'.
In other words, mis- and disinformation are more easily combatted when freedom of expression is protected and promoted, rather than 'balanced' with other alleged rights. The Commission, then, may well be in danger of engendering, through its speech-chilling warnings about its censorship powers, an ecosystem conducive to the very thing it was set up to defeat.
It is worth noting, as it happens, who the public identifies as the main agents of disinformation. According to the Reuters Institute Digital Report for 2020, 40% of surveyed respondents identified the government, politicians or political parties in their own country as the sources most responsible for false and misleading information online. 'This', the report continued, 'echoes arguments from scholars that misinformation often comes from the top (and not from ordinary people)'.
Interestingly, scholarship also suggests that exposure to misinformation, or 'fake news', may have little effect on beliefs or behaviour. Returning to the UN Report, only a small proportion of people are exposed to disinformation (again taken from research by Reuters Institute of Journalism). And these people tend to be both heavily engaged online, and ideologically partisan in the first place, thus primed to absorb misinformation that supports their pre-existing beliefs. In general, as Jacob Mchangama points out, multiple studies have found that so-called 'fake news' is neither as pervasive nor even as detrimental as often assumed. There is an element of misinformation, then, regarding the hysteria over misinformation.
It is also worth reiterating the point that, in the age of social media, misinformation is something that one can check immediately, if one cares to do so. The very thing you are holding in your hand when you see a dubious-or all too believable-online claim can be used to discover if it is true or false. And we do, I think, need to sometimes consider the responsibility of the recipient, as well as the source, of mis- or disinformation.
Take the recent great Hallowe'en hoax of 2024. Look at the crowds that gathered, for the parade that never was. I have seen some commentary suggesting that this was an example of 'misinformation', and that the event-or non-event-was an example of how dangerous social media can be. I actually tend to think it was a rather hilarious hoax. It may well be the case that the most gullible people in the world are those who willingly go to watch parades (there is, of course, a particular demographic that loves parades; they have at least one every year, and it just so happens that they have swallowed, among other things, the most absurd claims about identity and human nature).
But getting back to what we might call the 'ghost parade' (rather appropriate for Halloween). There is a lesson here. The very same source or medium of this alleged misinformation is the source of its potential falsification. In the pocket of everyone who stood on O'Connell Street waiting for a parade was an instrument that could have been consulted to discover whether there was going to be a parade or not.
Less trivially, let's take the case of the President of the Medical Council, and her recent article in the Irish Independent.Dr Suzanne Crow took Donald Trump's remark about 'protecting women whether they liked it or not', and concocted an entire op-ed about healthcare and reproductive rights being put in danger. Even an eminent medical professional couldn't take the time to check what Trump was actually saying. She ran with the reading given by Kamala 𝕏 Harris and other media sources. And, notably, the Indo opinions editor didn't enlighten her 𝕏 either. Recall what we said about those most prone to mis-or disinformation tending to be the most partisan ideologues? Rather worrying that the president of the Medical Council might seem to be in that category.
We have never been better equipped to tackle mis- or disinformation than now; we all have a computer at hand-literally at hand-vastly more powerful than the computers that got man to the moon. But even when we have this tool to winnow out truth from falsity, some of us would rather take the headline and believe what suits us. It is not the internet or social media that is a danger; it is human nature, and its tendency to blind ideological tribalism.
So: take some responsibility. As another Republican President once said-or tried to say: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The solution to mis- or disinformation is at hand; for it shares the very same source as the cause, and it is in our hands.
Dedicated to Michael Dwyer"
Original article: Gript