Mission to Mitigate: Are the Government helping?

If Brexit doesn’t highlight the severe harm that misinformation and disinformation poses then we still have more to try and convince you!

After looking at a few of the lies that influenced the result and with confessions that prove the information was false, it is time to look at what is being done to tackle misinformation and disinformation.

The proposal of the Online Safety Bill has been through a long road to be awarded the essential debate in Parliament. Originally scheduled to be discussed in July, the bill has only now began its discussion and is making progress by making it to the third draft. Recent events such as the resignation of Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party Leadership Election, the short term in office with new Prime Minister Liz Truss who resigned over a split Conservative party and the introduction of the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has delayed the Bills discussion. This Bill has been created to make Britain the safest country when it comes to internet access. The bill aims to do this whilst protecting the right to free speech which has been a huge belief for all three recent Prime Ministers mentioned above. The Bill will see Ofcom step in as regulator to ensure all the necessary online pages uphold the rules set. Whilst Ofcom would regulate, it is primarily down to each individual online site to determine what harms are and what harms need to be removed from their site. Further to this, the Bill does not have any credible ideas relating to misinformation and disinformation. The only part of the bill which somewhat addresses misinformation is through the idea of setting up a committee to advise Ofcom. There is talk of later adding to the Bill a section where the Government sets out what they believe is harmful to help guide online sites. Right now the Bill is promising to help harmful online issues but it doesn’t go far enough to include misinformation and disinformation especially now that it has been experienced with Brexit, the Covid-19 Pandemic and Elections both in the UK and globally. We do recognise that this bill is still in the preliminary stages of being amended to be passed, so it is our only hope that misinformation and disinformation will be included as a main part to tackle. The Lords Democracy and Digital Committee supports tackling misinformation and disinformation as after its presence during the Covid-19 Pandemic it became clear that this usage of spreading information will not go away.

The UK government and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have worked on a campaign together named Stop the Spread which was all about stopping misinformation and disinformation. The campaign ran from May to June 2020 and aimed to encourage the everyday person to use trusted sources when looking for information relating to Covid-19. The campaign was all about misinformation which was really good to see but it would be better to have a longer running campaign led by the WHO with other countries involved or even just the UK as the WHO are an organisation that people do listen.

There is also a misinformation unit set up by Marcus Beard after he and his team tracked online news articles and social media posts to understand the impact they have on the newly elected government. The team came across a story entitled “Government votes that animals can’t feel pain or emotions” which was not being reported in the mainstream media until later on in The Guardian. It remained online for a long time and finally it came out that story was false. Beard was recruited to a team by the Government after the 2019 Election highlighted how severe misinformative posts are and the volume of posts was unbelievable. Misinformation has rapidly increased generally but more so with events such as elections, the death of the Queen, Covid-19 and events such as COP. The unit is still ongoing right now.

So far there has been some sort of attempt to tackle misinformation but the attempts have to be better. The real promising attempt is the Misinformation unit set up b y the Government but more has to be done as we are all needed to mitigate this threat: us, you and the government. We hope to see more campaigns, extending the units (if financially viable) and better thought out laws.