Truth decayDemocracy under Threat from “Pandemic of Misinformation” Online: Lords Committee

The U.K. government should act immediately to deal with a “pandemic of misinformation” that poses an existential threat to our democracy and way of life. The stark warning comes in a report published Monday by the House of Lords’ Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies.

The Chair of the Committee, Lord Puttnam said:

We are living through a time in which trust is collapsing. People no longer have faith that they can rely on the information they receive or believe what they are told. That is absolutely corrosive for democracy.

“Part of the reason for the decline in trust is the unchecked power of digital platforms.

These international behemoths exercise great power without any matching accountability, often denying responsibility for the harm some of the content they host can cause, while continuing to profit from it.

We’ve seen clear evidence of this in recent months through a dangerous rise of misinformation about COVID-19. We have become aware of the ways in which misinformation can damage an individual’s health along with a growing number of instances where it is our collective democratic health that’s under threat.  That must stop – it is time for the Government to get a grip of this issue.

They should start by taking steps to immediately bring forward a Draft Online Harms Bill.

We heard that on the current schedule the legislation may not be in place until 2024.

That is clearly unacceptable.

We have set out a programme for change that, taken as a whole, can allow our democratic institutions to wrestle power back from unaccountable corporations and begin the slow process of restoring trust. Technology is not a force of nature and can be harnessed for the public good.

The time to do so is now.”

Recommendations

·  The report says the Government must take action ‘without delay’ to ensure tech giants are held responsible for the harm done to individuals, wider society and our democratic processes through misinformation widely spread on their platforms.

·  The Committee says online platforms are not ‘inherently ungovernable’ but power has been ceded to a “few unelected and unaccountable digital corporations” including Facebook and Google, and politicians must act now to hold those corporations to account when they are shown to negatively influence public debate and undermine democracy.