Emotional Disinformation on Social Media – Advising Australia’s Electoral Matters Committee
In August 2020, Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay were invited to submit evidence to the Inquiry into the Impact of Social Media on Elections & Electoral Administration, conducted by the Electoral Matters Committee, Parliament of Victoria, Australia. (This followed their submissions across 2017-19 to the globally influential Inquiry into Fake News and Disinformation, conducted by the UK’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee.)
The Electoral Matters Committee wanted to know how online political advertising was changing elections; and what should be done about any negative impacts in the short-term and long-term in Australia. This year-long Inquiry held 7 days of hearings and attracted 126 submissions from global experts and key actors.
For better and for worse. For richer and for poorer.
Bakir and McStay drew on their ongoing work for a monograph on Emotional AI and Disinformation (contracted with Springer, due 2022) which seeks to diagnose core economic and political drivers of the global phenomenon of online emotional disinformation, and to evaluate solutions proposed from across the world. Informing their submission to the Inquiry, Bakir and McStay analyse how social media changes elections for better and for worse.
They further observe that online advertising is a key economic driver behind the proliferation of online disinformation as behavioural advertising funds fake news sites through use of adtech to profile and target people; and datafied emotional content is optimised to generate social media shares for internet traffic and advertising income (clickbait audiences) whether for real news, fake news or political campaigning. They also note that dominant digital platforms have taken various actions to disrupt the business models for the production and amplification of microtargeted disinformation. Governments have also acted in different ways across the world to protect their populations from disinformation and misinformation, especially during elections, and Australia’s Parliament of Victoria wanted to know what to do.
Quick Fixes and Longer Term
After three weeks studying the issue in the Australian context and writing their submission, Bakir and McStay recommended the following for Australia:
- Two quick, uncontroversial fixes. a) Increase the transparency of online political ads by ensuring that social media platforms keep accessible, searchable libraries of political ads and political issue ads. b) Ensure that there are digital imprints to hold advertisers accountable for what they say.
- Longer term, close attention should be paid to the legality of microtargeting. Also, more studies are needed into the impact of microtargeting on electorates, both in terms of direct influence and regarding wider trust in the fair conduct of elections.
In September 2021, the Electoral Matters Committee published their 277-page long Final Report from the Inquiry. It concludes that the Australian government needs to take multi-faceted action to preserve the positives arising from social media (such as politicians increasing engagement with citizens on issues that people care about), while reducing the negatives, and fulfilling the community’s duty to safeguard democratic institutions from deceptive microtargeting and abusive comments. Bakir and McStay’s research fed into nine of the Inquiry’s 70 Findings, and two out of the Inquiry’s 33 Recommendations (see Table 1).
