In 2021, the Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America on Access to Electronic Data for the Purpose of Countering Serious Crime (commonly referred to as the Australia-US CLOUD Act Agreement) was signed.

An amendment created a framework under the existing Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (TIA Act) to enable Commonwealth, state and territory agencies to obtain data from communications service providers in foreign countries with which Australia has a designated agreement.

That’s the official version. When the going gets rough, it probably doesn’t matter if a “designated agreement” exists or not. Another nation routinely treated as hostile – for both justified and unjustified reasons – is censoring online posts in the name of social harmony.

In “China smothers #MeToo talk” (The New York Times, 8 September 2022) on violence against women, Alexander Stevenson and Zixu Wang write that, “China’s Communist Party has long promoted gender equality as one of its core tenets, yet as such cases continue to make national headlines, Beijing has done little to address calls for accountability.”

The article claims that, “Fearing social unrest, the party has instead used social media censors to stifle criticism and amplify comments that support the government’s preferred narrative of social harmony.”

It would be naïve to believe that government surveillance of social media does not happen in more liberal countries. After all, as the Australia-US CLOUD Act Agreement indicates, those deemed responsible for political or social unrest can also be “suspected” of serious crimes.

Western governments might not sanction social media overtly – in fact they argue that unless direct incitement to violence is involved, this is the responsibility of the platforms. But they would certainly do so covertly if it were alleged to be in the national interest.

Russian web brigades – state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Government of Russia – are now well known. Organized in teams that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums, they use sock puppets (false online identities), social bots, and large-scale trolling and disinformation campaigns.

Citing India, Myanmar, Iran, and Ethiopia as having had some of the longest or most frequent internet closures in the past year, Rina Chandran writing on the Thomson Reuters digital media platform Context (29 September 2022) says, “Shutdowns threaten basic human rights – stopping journalists from reporting on rights violations, hampering aid operations and making it hard for people to communicate with friends and family. But governments often fail to acknowledge shutdowns and justify them on grounds of public safety and national security.”

Government narratives justifying oppression depend on covert surveillance data and misinformation to create an illusion of truth. We need to call them out.

Photo: Philll/Shutterstock

The DSA aims to limit the spread of illegal content online and it establishes a new set of obligations for private actors with the aim of creating a secure and safe online environment for everyone.

The DSA applies to hosting services, marketplaces, and online platforms that offer services in the European Union. It applies to all providers regardless of their place of establishment. Individuals residing in the EU will fully benefit from the DSA’s protections.

The DSA singles out Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) as well as Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), with more than 45 million average monthly active users in the EU. It recognizes that such platforms in part control public discourse and the manipulative influence they have on people’s online behaviour. The DSA sets out:

• Enhanced transparency rules that require online platforms to disclose the number of removal orders issued by national authorities and all notices about the presence of illegal content trusted flaggers submit or obtain by automated means.
• Unified criteria for so-called notice-and-action procedures, the system that determines when and if platforms should be held liable for dissemination of illegal content.
• A measure addressing deceptive design aimed at preventing all online platforms from designing and operating their interface design in a deceptive and manipulative way.
• Strict regulation of online advertising. It establishes a ban on advertising based on profiling and using special categories of sensitive data (e.g. sexual or political orientation).
• An obligation for all online platforms to disclose parameters of their content recommender systems to explain why people see some information more regularly than others.
• A duty-of-care obligation for Very Large Online Platforms that includes mandatory risk assessment; deployment of mitigation of risk measures; and obligation to subject themselves to independent audits.

Properly and effectively enforced, the DSA will safeguard peoples’ rights to freedom of expression and information, freedom of thought, and the right to form an opinion freely without manipulation. It also includes better access to effective remedies.

However, the DSA is not perfect. According to IFEX (26 July 2022), “It was given a qualified welcome by IFEX members, who generally praised its strong emphasis on ensuring transparency (for example, requiring platforms to explain content moderation policies and the use of automated tools), but also raised concerns over (among other things) its failure to decentralise content curation, its lack of an explicit right for users to encryption and anonymity, and its failure to provide stronger safeguards against potentially expanding government censorship.”

Despite these caveats, any legislation that places people before corporate interests and which enhances the digital security of individuals is an improvement over the free-for-all couldn’t care-less attitude of the past decade. Now let’s make the DSA work!

Information source: accessnow.org

Photo: Cristian-Storto

Every language is a uniquely important way to describe and make sense of the world. Every language and every dialect – the many local variations of language – embodies identity, culture, and traditional ways of understanding the world.

Shakespeare’s famous song from Cymbeline (Act IV, Sc. II) plays on traditional knowledge.

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

The Book of Common Prayer (1549) speaks of “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, lines adapted from the Bible (Genesis 3:19) and well known to Shakespeare’s audience.

In this sense, everyone comes to dust when they die, whether they be rich or poor. Chimney-sweepers also came to dust every working day of their lives scraping soot from chimneys

But there is another local meaning, allowing Shakespeare to play on words. “Golden lads” is Warwickshire dialect for the flower known as a dandelion (itself a corruption of the French dent de lion). And chimney-sweepers is the dialect name for a dandelion-clock, the seed-cluster left over after the yellow flower has matured and whose seeds gradually blow away.

So, language is the way people communicate with each other, build relationships, and create community. Apparently, Nelson Mandela never said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” But, in a different context, he did use similar words, and Mandela’s own humanity made his meaning clear.

Language rights fall within the larger framework of communication rights. And today people are speaking of digital rights or digital justice because a large part of today’s communication takes place via digital technologies and platforms.

Consequently, the familiar right to freedom of opinion and expression, with its pitfalls of slander, disinformation, and hate speech now apply to digital rights. These are in the process of being codified and translated into as many languages as possible (with an initial target of 100), so that people the world over can understand and come to terms with the astonishing impact of digital technologies on society.

For digital justice to prevail, we need principles that allow all people to engage in transparent, informed, and democratic debate, where people have unfettered access to the information and knowledge essential to peaceful coexistence, empowerment, responsible civic engagement, and mutual accountability.

In other words, language rights and digital justice go hand in hand.

Photo: Romolo Tavani/Shutterstock

Thatcher misconstrued the role of public interest media, but the underlying question is legitimate. How to report “problematic content” and contentious happenings while retaining a measure of objectivity, balance, and fairness?

An immediate example – among many worldwide – is the current Ukraine crisis. Where do we put our trust? Of course, the answer lies in a close reading of as many sides as possible, coupled with an intelligent assessment of history, contemporary realities, and a pinch of cynicism.

In the UK, BBC Two is currently airing Louis Theroux’s “Forbidden America”, which falls squarely into the category of “problematic” content. Theroux raises Thatcher’s issue of “platforming”: the idea that it is irresponsible to amplify hateful voices and that doing so is to contribute to their power and their harm. The argument goes that news editors and the public should ignore the toxic and the dangerously misinformed: exclude them from the conversation. Before the Internet and social media, that might have been possible.

In “‘They had their own cameras trained on me’ – Louis Theroux on his showdowns with US extremists” (The Guardian, 10 February 2022), Theroux writes:

“Broadcasters have always had an obligation to think about ways in which they reflect opinions that may be misinformed or hateful. Making it even more pressing nowadays is the demonstrable harm caused by the spread of false information online and the way this has empowered formerly marginal figures such as conspiracy theorists and nativists.”

Theroux asks why it is necessary to hear from these people? “Well, you might not need to. But the reason you might choose to is because of what their existence says about the world we are living in, and because of the very real power they represent… So the choice we are faced with is whether to be curious about that phenomenon, try to figure out why it’s growing, what it’s feeding on, how it can be challenged, or whether to ignore it and hope it goes away.”

The impact of digital technologies on societies and communities – indeed, on individuals – is being debated and explored in depth at a time when it is still possible to regulate and demand accountability of digital platforms. But there is more. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”: “It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information… to avoid brainwashing and to distinguish reality from fiction.”

The oxygen of publicity is a vital component of democratic debate. But so is the oxygen of wisdom.

Image: Metamorworks/Shutterstock

There is a long-standing dialogue about “objectivity”. If “objectivity” is seen as being neutral, many rightly point out that everyone, media included, has a bias. Understanding that bias is key to critically reading any news story.

On the other hand, especially in the current environment when many journalists and media agencies are experiencing charges of political bias that cast doubt on all their reporting, the line between factual reporting and advocacy seems more and more hazy and, therefore, perilous.

The goal of journalism is public information, transparency, accountability. These alone have an advocacy component, especially seen in investigative journalism.  But such journalism is neither judge nor jury.

To paraphrase one professional journalist, the role of news media is to present the information as fairly as possible and allow the reader to make the decision.

This still doesn’t signify the absence of a sense of justice or equality. Indeed, when WACC promotes gender-sensitive reporting, as GMMP coordinator Sarah Macharia has stated, “We are not asking journalists and editors in newsrooms to be gender equality activists; we are simply asking for professionalism from a gender perspective… I think many of the problems can be solved just by paying attention. Do the necessary work so you no longer need to rely on the same five men and their opinions. And stop using the same old sexist cliches when describing a woman.”

Good journalists develop networks, find experts to state their opinions and back up their statements with facts and data. They seek perspectives from different sides of the issue or responses to allegations with enough solid information that readers or viewers can assess for themselves.

Some journalists may indeed consider themselves activists on issues “out of the office” – from gender equality to racism to poverty to political preferences. But if issues come too close to the heart, one’s coverage might be dismissed too easily by detractors who point out your bias. Thus, asking another journalist to cover the story may give the coverage more weight and validation.

Perhaps the response to the question can a journalist be an activist? is that good journalism makes us all activists for justice and accountability.

 Photo by Joppe Spaa on Unsplash

One example of such regulation is Australia’s proposed online safety legislation, which will require internet service providers, social media companies, and other online platforms to remove severely harmful, abusive, or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and sanctioned.

Under federal government legislation, if a website or app ignores takedown notices for contentious content, the e-safety commissioner will require search engines and app stores to block access to those services. Websites and social media platforms will face fines of up to $555,000 for ignoring a direction to remove the material, while individuals will face fines up to $111,000.

A rapid website-blocking power has been added to allow the commissioner to respond to online crisis events such as a terrorist attack, by requesting internet service providers to block access to extremely violent content for a limited period of time.

As well as substantial new measures to protect adults online, the draft legislation also adds protections for children, expanding the cyberbullying scheme to enable removal of material from online games, websites, messaging and hosting services – rather than just social media. It remains to be seen how effective these actions will prove.

Such measures seem required not just for political and security reasons, but also for public health. Just recently, and in connection with Covid-19, research has shown that big Facebook accounts, some with more than half a million followers and long histories of promoting falsehoods, are still openly posting material detrimental to the roll out of vaccines. Prominent anti-vaxxers, now banned from Facebook, are continuing to spread misinformation via Instagram, which Facebook owns.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization had named “vaccine hesitancy” – reluctance to get vaccines even when they are available – one of the top 10 threats to global health. For example, anti-vaxx activists have been using private Facebook groups to convince mothers not to vaccinate their children, and to coordinate social media harassment campaigns against doctors promoting the medical benefits of vaccines.

Responsibility and accountability are the watchwords for the next decade.

Photo: Ilyas Tayfun Salci/Shutterstock: Anti-mask, anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters stage a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London

How do public interest media – the kind that publish information and points of view on important issues that affect policies, lives, and livelihoods – stay independent?

How neutral should public interest journalism be in the face of blatant manipulation, misinformation, and lies?

How accountable should social media be for misleading or provocative content?

As Michael Goldfarb points out in “Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us” (The Guardian, 8 November 2020), “Media is the second stream that helped create the Trump presidency. The ‘siloing’ of American society has long been noted but just how incomprehensible people had become to one another after a quarter of a century and more of being in such different media environments overwhelmed the anti-Trump side.”

The detrumpification of both legacy and social media is imperative if American society is to rebuild itself along the lines envisaged by President-elect Biden.

Part of the problem lies in newsroom practices. In “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists” (The New York Times, 23 June 2020, Wesley Lowery writes, “Neutral ‘objective journalism’ is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making: which stories to cover, how intensely to cover those stories, which sources to seek out and include, which pieces of information are highlighted and which are downplayed. No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.”

It’s a fair point, except for the long-held expectation that journalism worth its salt will be honest, balanced, and transparent. Over many years, and not just in the USA, that notion has been trashed over issues such as war, racial justice, migration, and the climate crisis.

Trump led the way, denouncing and denigrating traditional media. He helped corrupt social media, developing echo chambers of supporters, including influential conservatives and ordinary supporters who claimed that mainstream news sources distorted Trump’s truth. An organized network of far-right groups amplified that message on and offline.

Simon Houpt in “The rise of Trump fact-checks exposes the media’s built-in vulnerability to misinformation” (The Globe and Mail, 11 November 2020) observes, “Mr. Trump has exposed the vulnerabilities of our information ecosystem. What are we willing to do to fix it?”

It’s a great question! Who will make it happen?

Photo: Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock