University of Kwazulu-Natal

The Regulation Of Disinformation A Critical Appraisal

Bonisiwe Shabane
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the regulation of disinformation a critical appraisal

Efforts to strategically spread false information online are dangerous and spreading fast. In 2018, a global inventory of social media manipulation found evidence of formally organized disinformation campaigns in forty-eight nations, up from twenty-one a year earlier.1 While disinformation is not new, the ways in which... As a report from the Eurasia Center, a think tank housed within the Atlantic Council argues, “There is no one fix, or set of fixes, that can eliminate weaponization of information and the intentional... Still, policy tools, changes in practices, and a commitment by governments, social-media companies, and civil society to exposing disinformation, and building long-term social resilience to disinformation, can mitigate the problem.”2 In other words, false... The 2016 election and the revelations in the years since about the breadth of disinformation have opened many eyes to the potential impact of strategic dissemination of false information online.3 As this complex problem... Heidi Tworek correctly notes in her chapter that five years ago there was a question about whether social media was going to be regulated.

Today, that question has morphed into how and when. Tworek uses historical examples from Germany to provide greater context for the current disinformation age and outlines five historical patterns that create the structural conditions that enable disinformation. First, disinformation is a part of information warfare, which has been a long-standing feature of the international system. She argues that if the causes of disinformation are rooted in international causes, some of their solutions must also be international in design. Second, physical infrastructure matters. The architecture of political communication spans a hybrid media system that includes traditional media along with digital forms, all of which have been used extensively for coordinated disinformation.4 Online disinformation is a strategy disseminated...

Third, business structures are more important than individual pieces of content. In other words, as the main sources of information, those companies with market dominance must be understood as fundamental to the form of the disinformation Fourth, regulatory institutions must be “democracy-proof,” with clarity of... Fifth, media exploit societal divisions, and it is these divisions that fuel so much of the disinformation spread online. Disinformation is neither a new problem, nor a simple one. This chapter aims to build on Tworek’s historical patterns and apply them to the modern disinformation age in order to clarify the challenges to effective disinformation regulation and to offer lessons that could help... This chapter identifies three challenges to effective regulation of online disinformation.

First, the question of how to define the problem of disinformation in a way that allows regulators to distinguish it from other types of false information online. Second, which organizations should be responsible for regulating disinformation. As Tworek notes, the international nature of online disinformation, the physical structure of the Internet, and the business models of dominant online platforms necessitate difficult choices regarding who should be in control of these... Specifically, what regulatory role should belong to central governments, international organizations, independent commissions, or the dominant social media companies themselves. Finally, we must ask what elements are necessary for effective disinformation regulation. After analyzing the major challenges, four standards for effective disinformation regulation emerge.

First, disinformation regulation should target the negative effects of disinformation while consciously minimizing any additional harm caused by the regulation itself. Second, regulation should be proportional to the harm caused by the disinformation and powerful enough to cause change. Third, effective regulation must be nimble, and better able to adapt to changes in technology and disinformation strategies than previous communication regulations. And fourth, effective regulations should be as independent as possible from political leaders and leadership of the dominant social media and internet companies and guided by ongoing research in this field as much as... Terminology and definitions matter, especially as problems are identified and responses are considered. Disinformation is one of a few related, and often confused, types of false and misleading information spread online.

There are many types of misleading information that can be dangerous to democratic institutions and nations. A number of recent studies have attempted to identify the definitional challenges associated with false or misleading information online in order to produce useful definitions for the purpose of more clearly understanding the problem.5... This paper uses the definitions from Claire Wardle’s essential glossary of the information disorder, which was also adopted by the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on disinformation convened by the European Commission:7 Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14319)) Included in the following conference series: The spread of Fake News poses a significant threat to democracy and public discourse.

Instances of disinformation have had serious consequences, such as undermining election integrity and reducing vaccine trust over the recent years. Moreover, terminological variations and digital neologisms hinder consensus among scholars. The Internet proliferation has intensified the challenge of managing false content, demanding technological tools and regulations. This study explores the complexities of Fake News and the need for regulatory measures. A comparative law methodology is used to analyze international and European regulations concerning Fake News. Social media policies and reporting methods are also investigated, aiming to find ways to combat misinformation effectively.

On the one hand, a fragmented regulatory framework both at a European and International level is revealed. To cope with this scenario, a multilingual ontology to harmonize definitions and facilitate compliance is proposed. On the other hand, the crucial role of Social Media policies, their algorithms’ transparency, and educating roles are considered. This leads to the need for an enhanced regulation of social media, educational initiatives of digital media literacy, and AI-driven news apps to provide trusted sources and manage misinformation in a better way. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive. Ultimately, this is a hack whose real purpose is to give a "good enough" placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do...

Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain. This website is running Anubis version 1.21.3. There is a continuous slate of articles, features, and other coverage that tackle “disinformation” in light of the super election year of 2024. Again and again people are asking: Can targeted disinformation campaigns manipulate opinions and influence elections? We are obviously asking ourselves these questions, too.

At the same time, we want to know in how far we might be stuck in our own “bubble” and whether society at large agrees. The results of our representative survey, which we’ve just published in our study “Disconcerted Public”, are as alarming as they motivate us (and people) to act. In an increasingly digitised world, where information is abundant and the distinction between true and false often murky, the spread of disinformation is threatening democracy and social cohesion. Our study results are unfortunately strikingly clear: concerns and an awareness of the threat of disinformation has arrived in all parts of society, both in Germany and the U.S. An overwhelming majority of respondents considers disinformation a serious problem for democracy and social cohesion. Most notably, respondents point to the connection between disinformation and the manipulation of political opinion, the influence on elections and the division of society.

There is a snag in digital spaces: It is worrisome that almost half of all respondents is unsure about the veracity of information online and one third indicates encounters with disinformation in the last... Respondents are most likely to encounter disinformation on social media, but also on blogs and news sites as well as messenger services, such as WhatsApp or Telegram. TikTok, X (Twitter) and Facebook present the highest rate of disinformation. Topics, such as immigration, climate crises, health, warfare as well as elections, are identified most often. Protest groups, activists, bloggers, influencers, and political actors, both domestic and foreign, are most often assumed to be perpetrators and people responsible for the spread of disinformation. Trust in the media appears to be decisive: Respondents with low trust in the media are more likely to consider disinformation politically motivated and used for discrediting opponents, and they are more susceptible to...

There is an urgent need to act here to strengthen people’s trust in the media landscape and increase resilience in countering disinformation.

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