Defeating Disinformation

Global media platforms have incredible potential to connect people around the world. At the same time, they also raise questions about authenticity, data integrity and disinformation. 

In a new book, Defeating Disinformation: Digital Platform Responsibility, Regulation and Content Moderation on the Global Technological Common, Joel Trachtman, Professor of International Law, and Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business, teamed up to study “how to balance free speech and dangerous online content to reduce societal risks of digital platforms.”

Trachtman and Chakravorti sat down for a discussion about their motivations to study disinformation, their methodology and the paths they envision for combating this multifaceted global issue. 

Joel Trachtman: We have this problem of disinformation, whether it's consumer fraud, election manipulation or cybersecurity problems, and the interesting thing is that different countries have different perspectives. 

The United States is a First Amendment, free-speech fundamentalist country. The European Union focuses on privacy. China focuses on party control of the information space, and other countries like Brazil and India are somewhere in between. With all of that, if you've got a global platform, you've got a problem of how to regulate it, where different countries will want different things.

Bhaskar Chakravorti: It's a pretty complicated issue, and it really needs us to draw upon the expertise of multiple disciplines. This is a classic Fletcher moment. We realized that really hard problems can't be understood by looking at them through a single lens

JT: We had experts in infectious disease, international taxation, financial regulation and international bank regulation tell us what happens in their areas when there's something that crosses borders that might have an effect on other countries, by virtue of the regulation in a home country or in another country.

Then, because this is Fletcher, we had several of our professors – me, Professor Chakravorti and others – looking at these multidisciplinary dimensions to bring that 360-degree analytical perspective to this problem and to try to understand what's the way to handle it. It's a changing problem that becomes more and more difficult as time goes by.

BC: We are experiencing an overload of information along with different variants on information, whether it's reliable information, slightly reliable information, completely unreliable information, deliberately unreliable information and dangerous information. We have the entire spectrum of information being delivered to us on a continual basis through very powerful forms of media, which are digitally carried. Of course, what that allows us to do is not only receive that information but also pass it on. As each one of us does that, the volume of this entire load of information, from completely reliable to totally unreliable, explodes all around us. That has all kinds of consequences, and our notion was that this phenomenon of disinformation is not new, but our ability to create it and disseminate it has gone up exponentially in a way that's actually quite new.

The impact that that has on our day-to-day lives, as ordinary citizens or as decision makers in organizations, whether they're public organizations or businesses or in civil society or even as individuals, changes quite significantly when we have so much to absorb and a little hard to tell which of these narratives are credible and which are not. 

JT: The book is called Defeating Disinformation, and its topic is social media regulation, the extent to which social media companies are permitted to or must monitor the user-generated content that exists on those platforms.

BC: We started this project with the recognition that disinformation and all the digital media that carried them and create them are inherently global. They don't respect political borders, even though they might be coming out of a U.S.-headquartered company or a China-headquartered company or a European company or whatever, but inherently they cross political boundaries seamlessly except in situations where governments have restrictions and so on and so forth. This information, or disinformation, is a global phenomenon.

JT: Multinational corporations do have to navigate these different regulatory systems. They often will go with the highest common denominator. That's assuming that there's a highest common denominator. There could be varying goals that different governments have. The Chinese government's goal of party leadership is quite incompatible with the U.S. goal of free speech, for example.

BC: So the challenge here is that the phenomenon we are trying to capture has no boundaries really, and the tools that we try to use against them have boundaries.

That was the first reason for launching this project, as we try to understand how we actually get our arms around disinformation, mitigate its impact and whose responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of policymakers and regulators? Is it the responsibility of the platforms, the digital media themselves? Is it the responsibility of the citizens and users who are absorbing this content and then potentially spreading it or taking actions associated with it? Ultimately, we know that the answer is all of the above.

JT: This book, I think, is an example of trying to array those different policies and those different tools of cooperation and identify some possible solutions.

Defeating Disinformation is available from Cambridge University Press.